Be bold, be bold, but not too bold
by Gray Glube
Summary: Between the breakfasts of cigarettes and coffee and the nights feeling homesick, between the red marks on lunar calendars and hankerings for red meat, there were stories and ceremonies, apologies and accidents, waning and waxing,alpha and omega.
1. Part 1

**Title**: Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.

**Author**: grayglube

**Rating**: M/NC-17

**Summary**: Between the breakfasts of cigarettes and coffee and the nights feeling homesick for a place they've never seen, between the red marks on lunar calendars and hankerings for red meat, there were stories and ceremonies, apologies and accidents, waning and waxing, alpha and omega.

**Spoilers**: None, NextGen

**Warning(s): **Dubcon, bloodplay, pseudo-bestiality

**Prompt:** #178: _Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others._ _-Eric Hoffer._

**A/N**: Originally this was supposed to be my entry for the nextgendarkfest but I dropped out because there was no way I could finish it the way I wanted to finish it in the time I had to write it. Thanks go out to stormsandsins for the help with the French. This is cut up into parts for easy reading since it is over 35,000 words.

* * *

><p>"<em>Even a <em>_wolf__ will not stay where sounds no bleat to offer hope of prey__"_

_3 Days before the Full Moon_

He wondered if she was home as the phone went on the eighth ring.

"Is she there, Ted? Teeeeeed. Teh-hee-ee…- Oi! Do not DO that!"

Looking down he spared the teenager a scathing glance that shut him up. He was not adverse to the idea of adding another smack to the back of his head, but the day was still young enough to not discard the urge or ignore its possibility of it happening later.

On the eleventh ring there was the clack of a pick-up. "'ello?"

Her voice was rough, impatient. It was not inappropriate to think she had been up all night, working, rummaging through reports looking for cures to curses and the matching game of faces to names.

He wondered if she had been woken by his efforts to get a hold of her all the same, it seemed unlikely but probable in any event. It was only a quarter after nine by his watch; she was either ready to sleep or freshly awakened. It didn't seem the appropriate time to ask which.

There was exhalation on the other end of the line, the sound of smoke against the receiver.

"It's me. I'm with Jamie and one of my mates, I was wondrin' if you had an extra bat."

The swoosh and slap of papers turning and being flicked away was in the background against her reply. There came an ensuing pause, for thought or maybe just the opportunity for her to take a drag off the cigarette he knew she was smoking.

"Yes, in one of the closets. I'll find it, you may keep it. Not much use for it zes days, anyway."

He smiled thinly and his eyes shot to the spot on the glass where James pressed his face up against it, taking pains to annoy him. Teddy waved the younger boy away and slammed the door to the booth shut with a glass snap to deter any further distractions.

The boy shot him a glare and turned his back to the booth, slumped and sullen that his efforts were for naught.

Teddy thought to himself that the boy was going to get his jumper wet, and he'd complain that his back was damp and cold for the majority of the day.

"There's a pity, you should come with us. I'm sure he'd appreciate the lesson." There was humor in his tone.

"I can't, I have admissions papers to fill. It's the holeedez, you know…," she paused and took a drag off whatever brand of backy was on sale, he simpered over her accent, some words brought it out more than others, her stress and lack of sleep made it almost possible to _taste _with some.

"Yeah, the ankle biters off from school and all that, you're not going to cancel for dinner are you?"

Her laugh was small. "_Non._ I will not be canceling."

"You'll just be bringing your papers to the table." He smiled with his retort.

"_Oui._ So when will you be coming?"

"In a bit. _Our_ little ankle biter is getting peekish."

"Good, then I can piddle about for a bit."

"Got to hide whatever bit of fluff you've got around to keep you from answering your phone?"

He played with the cord attached to the receiver and laid an arm across the top of the dial encrusted black box, he slumped and traced the numbers on the rotary dial with his finger through the metal holes.

"As if I'd have ze time, and I was ignoring the phone because ever since _maman _got one put in _naine nana_ has been calling and pretending to be funny with jokes and voices and she's not very funny and I'm getting very tired of it all."

There was a knock against the glass. Teddy looked up and from over the phone and outside his mate raised his wrist and pointed to an imaginary watch. Teddy waved him off too.

"I've got to go."

"Don't fret. Feed the little _**ado**_, he cannot help it."

"Wish it was only him. I'm out with Wood, promised him we'd go out for a bit when he came down from Romania, you know; re-live our youth and all that tripe."

There was a snort and a rasping cough from her end. It sounded bronchial and deep.

"Go zen, I will be here."

"Aces, be there soon."

"See you soon."

She hung up with no other pretense. He let the phone fall onto the peg, depressing it with a metal click.

It was raining.

The sky belched fat wet drops down onto the little box he stood in; he watched the slip of water down past the red panes, puddling at the ground.

It was a good day for a spot of practice.

A hand slammed against the pane and rattled him out of his grey mood.

Irving Wood opened the door and forced it the rest of the way with a lazy motion of his shoulder akin to a shrug.

"So vender then, mate?"

"Do we have to feed him?" Teddy asked with a smirk.

"Yes! You do! Let's go." Jamie took off in a direction Teddy could smell food coming from; the rain kept smells close to the ground, he could care less for rain in the week of a full moon. He could smell _everything_, from pungent to putrid, there was nothing too ripe that he was excused from acknowledging with his nose.

The other boy ran a hand through long hair, which Teddy had mentioned was not practical when one dealt with dragons for a living on more than one occasion, and tugged at his loose collar.

"We going to see your girl then?"

Teddy frowned and shoved him out of the booth, it was too hot inside the small box for two people to be in such close proximity. The other boy's cologne was making him nauseous; he found he couldn't deal with the scent while cramped up.

He started walking leaving the other boy trotting a few steps behind, taking strides to keep up.

"She's not my girl."

He stopped walking and sniffed out to decide which direction the youngest of their trio had taken to.

With a turn he faced the other boy. He gave him a look that dared him to say otherwise about who exactly Teddy's girl was or wasn't.

Irving Wood did. "You're having dinner with her."

He inhaled, looked up over the other boy's shoulder and sighed.

"I always have dinner with her."

"You shag her too?"

Teddy let his eyes fall to the other boy's. London's mood matched his own and when the repetitive white-noise of the drizzle became a stillicide pattering into the puddles coating the flagstones, his teeth set themselves into an almost painful clench.

"You shouldn't ask things like that right out, Wood. It's rude. And no, I haven't. Haven't even thought about it."

"…lately." Added the other boy with a grin.

The reply made him tight-nerved, mostly because it was true, slightly because someone had noticed.

Frustrated, he kicked at a waterlogged gap in the paved sidewalk sending water into the street.

"Besides I don't date. Not worth it, birds get curious."

"About why you disappear for three days a month?"

Raising his head to the sky he reached into his back pocket and thumbed out a fresh fag. Before placing it between his teeth he let his hand retreat from his mouth to answer.

"Yeah. Let's go eat, huh?"

He accepted a lighter from the other boy and lit up with a turn and puffed with a small bite to the filter.

Her building stood out on the marginally busy street where groups of men in suits with dripping, somber looking black umbrellas fresh from the offices and fresh off to the pubs rushed past, prowling for a quick, late lunch, and the view of gaggling, soaking schoolgirls that stood looking forlornly into shop windows.

She was the only tenant of the red-doored, three-floor walk-up. He'd remember when he and her pap helped her move in, she'd purchased it cheap on the pretense that it used to be an owlery and smelled slightly of excrement those first few months she inhabited it.

Which perhaps explained why she was the only tenant, her owning it aside, it was slightly dilapidated when she first set in to make it habitable.

Though she technically shared the three floor building with a rather eccentric robe maker that ran shop on the first floor, there was little other traffic inside besides herself and associated guests and the odd patron to the store front whose name was better suited for a brothel, in his opinion.

The hanging sign proclaimed : _The Flemish Lion: For Those Simply Dressed Best (1__st__ floor)_. A gryphon stenciled with an upraised paw and proud mane above and bright blue lettering below.

The tiled board set up next to the door that lead to the post box and the stairs to her floor proclaimed: _V. Weasley 2 &3_, there was a bell but it was molded over and would no longer depress.

He doubted if it would send up a ring at all if one managed to stab at it with enough force anyway.

Rain spewed down from guttering in need of repair, a torrent of dirty water slapped the even dirtier steps and the broom angled against the robemaker's window made brown rivers spill out from under its mane of dull yellow, muck-caked spines, it was a shite day that made even him feel soggy and shaken. Though it might have been just the early morning gloom that did most of it.

His hair bared the color of his disposition, a quiet and somber grey-hay blond.

The door to the stairs stuck, he shouldered it and tripped inside shaking off rain and a sodden temperament that could only be gotten from touting about with a thirteen year old who still found everything bright and shiny and a bone chilling, breath-frosting , wintry-mix sort of day.

He mounted the stairs with the oldest son of Harry Potter and his own mate, the dragon tamer, apprentice under Charlie Weasley, at his heels. He'd climbed the same steps enough times to know that there were fourteen, to her door at least. He'd never been up the remaining ten or so to the third floor.

Sometimes he wondered what she had up there, she told him she kept it empty and didn't elaborate. He'd pestered of course but she would often shrug and say when she found a purpose for it she would do something with it.

Her door was heavy wood with no decoration or number or name on or next to it on a plaque, he knocked heavy handed.

There were steps and he moved back when the knob turned and she filled the doorway.

The scent of cigarettes and violets hit him as it always did when she opened the door for him.

Her eyes skewed him from behind a pair of severe black rimmed spectacles, he'd come to acknowledge that they were as much a part of her face as her nose or lips, they stood out on her much too distinctly to ever be anything but a part of her.

They reminded him of Harry's in the way that they were ever-present.

Her clothes were expensive and very black, he'd have smiled and called them widow's wear but he knew how much she hated when he critiqued her modest black dresses with white collars and hems that swept her knees. She'd admonish him and say, 'If they were good enough for great-_grandmaman _they are still too good for me,' and she would frown and go about in a sour mood for his whole visit.

She'd swept her hair up and pinned it and she wore black stockings and tiny grey shoes that clacked against the wood.

He doubted if he'd ever seen her barefoot or padding around in stockinged feet before.

"Teddy," she went up on her toes to look over his shoulder. "Hello, Jamie. And Teddy I wish you'd told me it was Uncle Charlie's favorite_ novice_ you were bringing. Hello, Irving." She made a moue with her mouth and stood aside to let the trio inside.

"Nice to see you again Victoire, 's been awhile." The novice dragon tamer smiled back and Teddy barely contained his eyes from rolling about in his skull. 'Irving the charmer.' He doubted she was the type to be swayed but he also doubted that would stop the other boy.

"I still can't believe _you_ used to be a beater, Victoire!" Jamie pressed up past the two other boys to hang at her side.

Teddy grinned sideways at the glaze over the younger boy's eyes. It was like he had found his dream woman. He'd take the mickey out of him when they left over making eyes at his cousin.

It _was _hard to believe she had been a beater, and a spirited one at that, all mud and blood and ire on the field and back to being pristine no short time afterwards.

He trotted off while James all but hung onto his cousin's heels as she went on about her own days on the quidditch pitch back when she was still in school. Settling in a mismatched chair he watched her swim back into sight from through the tiny kitchen where she set the younger boy to the task of making coffee and tea in exchange for her bat.

Irving hung in the entry way studying her collection of photographs from recent and not-so-current trips to Paris and Cairo and the latest family vacation destination; Bombay.

He watched her turn away to place a throw cushion over a basket of laundry sitting on her lounger. The move was covert but he noticed it all the same and when she turned to him he smiled and leaned his head against the back of the chair. She seated herself to his left on her toffee colored couch amongst stacks of reports and a collection of tomes whose spines betrayed their contents as medicinal and pertaining to healing.

"Bit hot in here don't you think?" The question came for the entry way. Teddy inclined his head to look over at his friend.

"Feels fine to me, mate. Maybe you tired yourself out from climbing _all_ those stairs, yeah?" Teddy laughed and pushed his skull deeper into the heady smelling leather of the armchair.

"I think I just need to get some air, be back in tick." The other boy left, the door shut with a quiet click. There was the sound of descending footsteps and then rough coughing.

Clinks and clanks came from the kitchen as Jamie rattled mugs and tried to levitate the brewer behind him, it hung dangerously close to tipping all over the floor and Teddy had to steady it with a muttered bit of a leveling charm.

Setting them down on the low table framed by the couch, threadbare lounger, leather armchair, and stacks of books that easily came to the teenagers waist, Jamie gave a quick nervous glance at the petite witch who was more concerned with where her quill had gotten to and excused himself to fetch the teapot.

"I was _theenking _of going to the market to pick up liver for tonight. I want to play cards tonight too."

"No onions, though. I _loathe_ onions." Teddy replied with closed eyes.

She made a sound in the back of her throat that he took as assent. He didn't mention how her voice sounded rough or the sallow look her eyes had, she knew already and wouldn't appreciate the concern.

Her job as a mediwitch took late nights and too much paperwork for anyone's liking to get done properly.

"Are you smoking Benson's again?" She asked, not looking up from her search for a quill amongst various papers.

"No, splurged on Dunhill's this week."

"I'd murder for one." She replied after making a sound that he took to mean she'd found her quill.

He reached into his denims and tossed her his pack. "Matches are in there."

She set down her canary yellow fwooper feathered quill and fetched one out. The strike of the match made him open his eyes and sit up properly in the chair. She waved out the stick and he watched it glow orange in the dim light. It was always dark in her flat, he wondered how she read in it.

Jamie returned with the posh little kettle she'd brought from back home and set it on a rag amongst the mugs.

"How do ya take it, Vicky?" The boy asked unaware that she hated the nickname.

"Black. Tea and two sugars for Teddy," she answered not looking up and with a small grimace setting her lips in a tight line.

"Really! That's how I have mine. Black, I mean. The coffee. Right! Okay!"

Teddy knew for a fact that James drank tea for one thing and with too much milk for another.

He had a feeling Victoire was too polite to mention the same.

The idea of James having a crush on his, at least some part Veela, cousin did little to nothing to stop the small smile he got from the thought. Little Jamie was discovering girls, it would be a great and terrible time and Teddy remembered it well.

"I'll go off and find that bat for you. Alright. We'll have coffee and then it's off on your way to go play." She ruffled the younger boy's hair as she walked past done the hallway and into her bedroom to search.

James watched her go with stupefied eyes.

There was hacking loud enough to be heard coming from the stairs.

Teddy made a face. He rose.

"I'll be back Jamie. Don't be a bother."

It was a warning that could all too easily become a chastisement.

The boy looked a little too flushed for Teddy's liking but he nodded all the same and gave a dopey smile that seemed almost whimsical.

Leaving the flat Teddy found his friend at the bottom of the stairs, head in his hands, long hair blocking the sides of his face, opaque liquid blotting the floor and coating the sides of his boots.

Slowly his approach Teddy tried not to retch himself at the smell of vomit. He spelled the spew away out of the building and into the gutter outside. "You alright, mate?"

"Yeah, had to get out of there. The smell got to me I guess."

Teddy leaned his hip into the banister and focused on the back of the other boy's head.

"What smell?"

Below him his friend coughed and drew a shaky breath. "Smells like rot and flowers, made me a bit sick. Don't know how you deal with that Ted."

Teddy was utterly confounded; he stood with furrowed brows and slack composure.

"Deal with _what_?"

"Her, whatever. You _know_. I mean the _Veela_ thing. Just hit me when I walked in, like I was all knotted up and shite. Merlin, felt like I was to throw up on her rug and then…I don't know I just felt like I was twelve for a second, you know randy and all that, like how it gets as the reserve during mating season with all the pheromones and shite. Didn't know she could do _that_."

"Shit."

Teddy looked back up the stairs.

"What?"

He sighed.

"Jamie's thirteen. He's probably making a bloody fool out o' himself right now. Listen, I'll be back. Just wait for me outside, yeah?"

"Yeah, alright." The other boy got up using the banister and shuffled outside into the icy rain and open air. The door slapped shut behind and once it did Teddy didn't so much climb the stairs as rather he _tore_ up them.

He found himself unprepared to deal with the sight that afforded him. The beater bat lay across the lounger next to the basket of linens she had been folding but she was nowhere to be seen.

"I found it! I 'ave two, blue or gold?" Her voice came from the other room and Jamie seemed not to notice as for what he held between his fingers seemed to be much more interesting than choosing a color to whatever he had sent her looking for to get her out of the room.

The younger boy stood with eyes half-lidded smoothing his thumbs over the crotch on a pair of her knickers.

"Jamie!" Teddy hissed from behind with crossed arms, seething just a bit.

The boy turned with a slack expression and glassy eyes, he looked feverish. "What?"

"Gimme those!" Teddy picked the knickers from the boy's grasp and fisted them in his palm as if to hide the evidence of the misdeed.

"Okay," Jamie stood with his arm outstretched as if not realizing Teddy had already plucked the garment from his grasp and the look still in his eyes.

The click of heels from the hallway had Teddy shooing the younger boy out of the flat with expert speed.

"Teddy? You still 'ere? Where's James, I found the extra goggle straps he wanted," she had entered the living room and had not yet noticed that no one else was in the room.

He slammed the door on the younger boy and no sooner had he entered back into the room was there a bang on the door and a shout of, "Ted!" from behind the wood as James snapped out of whatever he had been held sway in to begin with.

"Teddy?" The blonde stood holding out both a blue and gold strap for him to take.

"Sorry, bout that. Here." He offered her her knickers.

They were pale pink and crenulated, very sheer and very French.

"Sorry they're wrinkled, Jamie looked like he was about to gnaw on them."

She took them from his hand and replaced them with the quidditch paraphernalia.

"It's alright, I'm used to it. Perhaps I should have opened a window and taken a bath before you all came over." Her smile was small and perhaps a bit knowing; there was humor in the curve of her lips.

"Why would you do that?" He didn't think he understood.

Her smile widened the tiniest of bits. "Because I smell different."

He didn't know what prompted him to answer in the way he did.

"Not to me."

"I suppose your nose knows something theirs' don't."

"Yeah? And what's that, Mediwitch Weasley?"

She had the slightest of facial twitches that made her eye shake, it only happened when she was tired and cross with him. He contained his grin, barely.

"Wolves know the sheep from the sheep-eaters." She shrugged and let her head tilt onto her neck.

"You are so full of tripe with that _veela _rubbish, may have Jamie smitten but I am immune to thy wicked charms ye temptress of ill-intent." He waxed poetic with brief theatrics, eyes closed and a hand to his chest.

"That was quite my point."

There was the slightest bite in her tone. He felt as if he'd missed some private joke they were supposed to share. Not knowing the best way to counter appropriately he settled to merely change the topic.

Harry had also been the one to say, '_Evasion is key when outmaneuvered._' Teddy didn't know if the advice fit but he couldn't remember any other auror related gems of wisdom quite as quickly.

"We'll play cards tonight, yeah? And liver, but no onions. Maybe some Odgen's if I get a chance to get away from those two and pick it up." He smiled but it felt limp and tired on his face.

"Alright. I will see you later _zen_." As soon as she spoke she brought her hand to her mouth, embarrassed by her accent. She tried to ignore it by focusing on picking her still burning cigarette out of a crystal candy dish that she used as an ashtray.

He watched her tap off the ashes and suck in a drag between chapped lips.

"It's the tee's and ayche's that do it to you, you know."

She gave him a looked that told him she knew exactly where her accent was and that she didn't need him to point it out. He shook his head and waved over his shoulder on his way out.

Sighing out smoke she watched him go and went back to work.


	2. Part 2

"_The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men a wild beast, and would devour each other but for this protection"_

_Before Summer Holidays, 7__th__ Year (3 years ago)_

_Whatever people said about patience being a virtue was utter and complete tripe. _

_There was a time for patience, and perhaps it was meant for people other than Teddy Lupin, at least that was what he'd thought upon his first meeting with the blue haired boy since the annual Weasley holiday dinner some months previous._

_He was not a patient boy, and he __**was**__ just a boy, for now at least, with perhaps only a minimal bit of man in him and those bits were only garnered from the trials he had faced so early in youth. _

_And those he'd yet to face. _

'_And there will be many,' the older man remembered thinking upon his walk up to the "Beast Master's" cottage at the edge of Hogwarts' grounds. Charlie had always been a bit of a git when it came to his 'title.'_

_It was the last day of term and Teddy would be leaving to London, though not by train, rather their means of conveyance to the drizzly and dismal city would have to be a bit quicker if he was going to go over certain areas of concern with the boy. _

_Bill Weasley had much to go over, much to teach, and much to warn against._

_It was a topic no one deemed 'polite,' perhaps it was due to the lack of subtlety one would have to have if ever even contemplating to broach the subject._

_They were worried._

_Harry and Ginny wavered between the duty they had to prepare Teddy for life on his own and holding him home. _

_Andromeda thought it best that the current arrangement stay in place._

_Charlie thought it was 'about bloody time' he got the three days a month he spent looking after Teddy to himself again._

_And him. Well…_

_Personally he felt a profound and awful regret when his mind turned to the subject at hand. The duty had fallen to him to teach the half-lupine boy how to ward his flat properly and how to ignore the urges that would come with the moon and how to fix the mistakes he would make, and he would make them. _

_He himself knew, he remembered his own, they went deeper than his scars, his mistakes had __**left**__scars. He hoped for Teddy, at least, that such things and such wavering from control could be avoided._

_Believing that such hopes would stay true, however, was another matter entirely. _

_Teddy was much more of a werewolf than he was himself. For all his control already there was much praise to be given, how much more he would have to gain was laudable._

_Self-control took much more than examination and emulation, it was practice and timing and luck and knowing one's self entirely. Knowing all the twisted and vile things of that animal side._

_He wondered if Teddy had yet to sit down and raise such a topic with himself, to delve inside that part of his mind when he went running through the forbidden forest when the moon was high and Charlie stood guard and McGonagall stood vigil at her high window and worried with a glass of wizarding spirits in hand._

_People so often thought that people like them, ones with blood that wasn't quite all person running hot and heady through them, were passionate, savage, __**dangerous**__. _

_They were._

_Just not in the way they hoped._

_They romanticized it, equated it with sex and something virile. _

_It wasn't. _

_At least, and he repeated to himself, not in the way they hoped._

_People thought of animals as passionate machines, he knew that was a quote from somewhere and that he shouldn't use it as his own, even in thought, but it seemed appropriately apt for his current line of meanderings. _

_As he walked through the sun down the beaten dirt to the cottage he wondered if Teddy had yet to realize that part of himself was going to poked and prodded endlessly from everyone, from ministry officials to curious birds making offers that they failed to think through properly to his family to his friends to his lovers. _

_He booted up the steps to Charlie's door and knocked heavy handedly._

"_Oi, 'ol hat hout," came gruffly muffled through the paint chipped door._

_Brushing hair away from his mouth blown there by a wayward breeze, Bill shifted his weight and wondered if he was late, checking his watch he found that he was, as he thought, early._

_A different set of booted steps sounded from behind the door. It opened and he was greeted with the smells of what he equated to last week's stale cigarettes, spilled butterbeer, and gripper-worm droppings from when Charlie had brought the creatures into the curriculum a year previous not knowing the full extent to which their more __**base**__ body functions acted up. _

"_Yer early. Learn to show up on time, eh?"_

_Charlie scratched at stumble not yet shaved away and leaned against the doorframe._

"_Good to see you too little brother," Bill smiled cheekily._

_He shoved the larger man aside and strode into the small hut. He took in the airy surroundings and the steaming kettle and the unmade bed and finally the boy, no, young man, sitting a table that dwarfed even his own tall stature. _

_Teddy sat suddenly straight and no longer restful, he was suddenly unnerved, conscious of what the rest of the day would bring._

_He was sporting a deeper shade of blue, Ravenclaw blue, that day. Bill thought he was quite spirited in fact. His hair was shaved on the side with a large tuft left behind, like plumage with a large bit of his other house color down the middle, true gold. The sides of his head sported knotted braids of full hair and then all the bits of blue and gold came together and hung in a long loose strip down his back._

_The boy certainly knew how to grab attention. If the hair didn't get tongues wagging the piercings would. His ears looked like pincushions, one eyebrow and lip was studded. _

_He'd even gone so far as to make his eyebrows blue._

_Commitment. _

_Bill hoped he put as much seriousness to his 'training' as his looks. _

"_Your gran would kill you," he stated taking up Charlie's seat. _

"_There's your Uncle Bill, the stickler for rules and normal hair colorings," Charlie sneered from his new spot in front of the stove. He brought mugs to the table with no small amount of porcelain clanks and tinks._

_Bill could swear he heard Charlie add, "and length," to the comment._

_He sat down on a backwards facing chair and poured the water over the steeped leaves._

"_You're early," Teddy commented, deeply fascinated by a stale biscuit from the way he didn't look up at Bill when he said it._

"_So are you," the older man retorted with a small smile._

"_Soooo, no more woods for you, huh mate?" Charlie offered by way of conversation._

_Teddy took his mug and clenched at it with a severe white knuckled grip. He was nervous. _

_Rightly so._

"_Yeah…I guess so," he answered finally, as if leaving a part of himself behind._

_Bill felt it, the change in the boy was almost palatable. His face suddenly had a much older hue to it, a lean and hungry look. He seemed so tired, so worn down by the possibilities of things to come, the look of someone who thought too much about things too serious and weighty. _

"_Drink your tea, Ted. We have too much to do and it won't get done sitting around keeping __**Uncle**__ Charlie from celebrating the end of term."_

_Charlie cast his brother a dirty look from above the rim of the mug settled against his lips. He kept the look long after the mug was set down and he'd swallowed the gulp._

_Bill was not sure whether the look was for the 'Uncle' he'd thrown at his younger brother or his declaration for Teddy to be ready to trot along much sooner than expected. _

_He gave equal weight to both options._

_Teddy sat back, relaxing marginally, or, at least, looking like he was. He raised his mug and gulped it down hot, without milk or sugar and then choked down a dry biscuit after he set the mug down weightily._

"_I'm done, let's go," he rose and walked to the door. Bill raised an eyebrow at Charlie over the boy's choice in clothing._

_His gran would definitely not approve of that choice either._

_The ragged denims and pointed toed boots and cut up shirt, she might very well have a coronary over it, if she was to see it._

_Charlie just shook his head and took another sip of tea that was sure to have much too much milk in it._

"_Alright then," the longer haired brother rose and tucked in his chair._

_Charlie did not rise; instead he raised a hand in 'good riddance' and set them on their way with a slap to the back to his brother and the toss of a plainly wrapped parcel at his, now former, student._

"_See ya, __**professor**__," Teddy threw behind him as he trotted down the steps of the cottage towards Hogsmeade._

"_Be seeing you Charlie, mum expects you to be at the table this Sunday," Bill reminded his brother as he followed the teenager out._

_Charlie looked up from fiddling with his mug with a stale biscuit still between his lips. His expression was startled, he groaned around the dry confectionary._

_They both knew exactly what topic their mother would be sure to bring up. The same topic that was always on the menu, it came right before Bill's hair and right after Ginny's smoking; Charlie's bachelorhood._

"_I'm going to abscond to Romania, again." _

"_Don't you dare!"_

_Charlie gave his brother a look that said: 'I do dare,' and quite possibly 'What are you going to do about it?'_

"_Bill! We going or what?" Teddy inquired from the bottom of the steps, smearing dirt with the pointed toe of his boot and thumping the top end of a pack of fags against the heel of his hand._

"_He's comin', keep yer pants on, Ted!" Charlie hollered. _

_Turning his attention back to Bill he pointed an accusatory finger and answered with sass. _

"_That's your cue, old man," He waved his finger towards the door. _

"_Tell mum that I might not be able to show my face for dinner, and that's the truth because my face might be rather stuck between the legs of the new barmaid's Rosemerta has been flaunting about." _

_The smile that followed was more roguish than necessary. _

_Bill rolled his eyes and nodded assent on his way out._

* * *

><p><em>The flat Teddy had bought with a large collection of checks the Ministry sent him every month as part of the "Orphans of War" fund was not overly large, but one would not call it small either. <em>

_It was furnished with a collection of rag-tag furniture given to the boy from Harry, no doubt collected from the hodgepodge of various collections collecting dust in the various rooms of Grimmauld Place. _

_Somehow the chairs and tables and sofas that looked so old and decadent and carried an air of malcontent had taken up new life in the airy little flat, now they merely seemed old and cozy, as if happy to be out of the dark._

_The loo was as clean as could be expected, the things stained were nothing a bit of scrubbing could erase from the tiles and porcelain. _

_The kitchen was old and well worn but somehow that made it attractive and homey. _

_The wood of the living space was scuffed and scratched from years of shoes walking over it and the movement of heavy bits of furniture across it. _

_The solitary bedroom was not large, but then again Teddy's bed was not small and neither would be his collection of dirty laundry given time enough away from home and Hogwarts. _

_There was left an empty room, devoid of all ornamentation and decoration, without windows and a door that was yet to be spelled properly. Bill thought it was a good size. The walls were strong and the door just put in was sturdy, it would hold._

_Together they walked in the rain to the flat._

"_London, you old soggy cu…-" The younger boy had stopped his comment short when Bill turned to give him an eye with raised brow._

"_Sorry, I gotta learn to watch my mouth," Teddy looked away from the glance._

"_It's alright, nothing I haven't heard before. Have you met my brother? Honestly, he could curse himself blue," Bill answered with a small smile. _

"_Yeah, I've noticed. Can't wait to see the flat, Harry said he dropped some stuff off and Aunt Ginny arranged everything."_

"_That's my little sister for you. Harry will tell you he helped but trust me Ted, she's the one to give all the thanks."_

"_I'll make sure to send flowers," Teddy skirted a puddle and came out in front of the older man only to fall back into side-by-side step a moment later._

_His hair was still the same as when they left the cabin and he wore an outrageous set of shaded blue spectacles to blot out the nonexistent sun. Bill choose not to say anything about it, the boy was still just that, a boy._

_They walked in forced silence. _

_The older man had elected to apparate to an out of the way block, so as to walk, so as to talk, rather. _

_He was having a time trying to find a place to start."_

"_You kn…-," he started._

"_So wh…-," Teddy started._

"_Oh! No you go first," the younger of the pair offered._

_Bill had forgotten the way he'd come up with to broach the topic. _

"_Uh…well I wanted to talk a bit about this situation. I mean unless you'd rather wait, Ted."_

_The boy stopped and with a moment of clarity removed his sunglasses as to make his seriousness clear. It was a polite gesture and Bill noticed._

_It made a difference. _

_Teddy's eyes were startlingly gold, the older man had not noticed before. _

_There was that school spirit again._

"_Yeah, no go on. We've got a ways to walk yet."_

_And in a gesture of nervousness he took out a cigarette and lit it smoothly. He blew the first drag out to the side._

_Bill had never seen him smoke but it was evident that the boy did, he reeked of tobacco. Though he supposed that was what happened when one snuck into the same empty dungeon classroom for a fag, oh yes, Bill could remember __**those **__days at Hogwarts._

"_Right then. There's just a few things," he took a breath. _

"_Right, okay. Firstly, there's always going to be people who know who you are, __**what**__ you are, and they'll be interested. There will be offers, when you start going out to places where birds make offers, the pubs, or, wherever. Don't take them up on it."_

_Teddy looked at him, patient and eager to listen even when Bill paused._

"_What I mean to say is, there will be a time when you think you know your limits. What days you can go out, well, how many days before the moon you can go out, and you won't be right. Things will happen that you can't control, things you don't take into consideration and you'll be dumb and stupid and kick yourself over things in the morning when you remember them. So if anything, when it comes to your control, no matter how good you __**think**__ it is, always __**under**__estimate yourself."_

_Bill looked over to see if Teddy understood. He did, he nodded that he did and took another drag from the cigarette cupped by his fingers._

"_Okay then, secondly, and this goes along with the last bit. You will fuck up, pardon my French. So, yes, you will screw up, make a mistake because you weren't thinking with your head, and it's not your fault but, yes, it will go along a road you certainly don't want to go down. You will think things you've never thought about before, think about __**doing**__ things, bad things, things that you'll, yet again, wake up and hate yourself for thinking. The trick is you just think you don't act, that's where you fuck up. Got it?" _

_Teddy nodded again and exhaled foggy, wet, smoke._

"_Thirdly, you have to be prepared for the time when you hurt someone. It may happened, it can happen, probably will happen. You'll overestimate yourself, go out too soon before a full moon, someone else will say or do something that pushes you and it will happen…and…," the older man paused as if reliving, reremembering something never quite forgotten._

_He coughed and cleared his throat, shaking off a memory. _

"_And…well it just helps to think of ways to get yourself out of those situations. You have to know yourself."_

"_How do you do it?" Teddy asked curious._

_Bill looked forward and smiled thinly. _

"_I make a list in my head of all the things it would cost me, if I lost control. I mean, at first when I did it, it didn't matter, the list would just disappear because I wasn't being sincere with myself about it. And then, slowly, through time, I was able to remember more and more of the list. I'll tell you it's a quick way to find out what your priorities are, by what you remember and don't remember when the moon comes up. For awhile I was alright and able to remember about three things and then nothing for awhile. Some months are easier than others I suppose."_

_Teddy flicked his finished fag into a puddle as they passed by it. _

"_Why did you forget one month?"_

_The older man stopped and looked up at the rain, the grey sky, the halo of the sun behind the clouds. _

"_It was the moon after Fred's funeral. That was a bad month."_

_For a few moments they stood in weighted silence, Teddy looked over into the street and the oil slicked asphalt, a kaleidoscope of colors against the black shine of the street._

"_Have you ever hurt anyone?"_

_The response came with no hesitation._

"_Yes."_

"_Who?"_

"_My wife."_

_Teddy couldn't ask another question. His lungs compacted inside his chest. He teetered on the edge of wanting to know and knowing not to ask about some things._

"_Maybe I'll tell you, someday. There's an alley, let's apparate in, my socks are wet from the last puddle I walked through, should've jumped the bloody thing." _

_The boy did nothing but nod and follow without any other questions, at least none that he was willing to ask._

* * *

><p><em>Despite hanging out the window, the exact window the wind whipped at and rattled the metal of the fire escape, Teddy could still hear Bill, fussy and exact in his dictation on how to press his bloodied thumb across all outside edges of the brick around the window. <em>

_Something wet and soggy slapped him in the face._

"_Bugger and beshrew it!" He finished with the charm and flung himself, lower body first, back into the flat. Red faced, wet, and taking heavy breaths he tried very hard not to glare at the ginger headed man lounging on his couch._

"_Done."_

_Not looking in the boy's direction, Bill propped his feet up on the coffee table and grinned. _

"_Good, that's all of the windows. I'll check them before I leave. Now, onto the room."_

_Teddy nodded and took out the small penknife he'd secreted away in his pocket. _

_He cut into the mound of his thumb, again and squeezed at the red flow, dug his nail into the slice, felt the flesh move and open, it stirred something primal in him, something that was sleepy and luxurious, ready to wake up. _

_But not yet. _

_Soon._

_Bill talked him through the Latin of the wards and was not disappointed with Teddy's recitation and while he himself spoke with dry, didactic, monotone, Teddy intoned with the exact pitch and weight to all the words, as if something he could do by habit, an ingrained string of phrases._

_When they were finished they furnished the doorframe with ruins drawn by penknife and blood and a shade of magic that wasn't quite black but very grey by the by._

_The rain had subsided to a gusty drizzle by then and it still howled outside with force, as if lamenting its end._

"_Is that it then?"_

_Bill took in the door and nodded more to himself than the question asked. _

_Teddy took it as assent and went to the kitchen. He sat himself on the breakfast counter and stretched a long leg across the gap to toe open the fridge with a booted foot._

"_Bugger flowers, your sister is worth a bloody lot more!" He shouted to Bill._

"_What?"_

"_She stocked me with groceries!"_

"_No, she didn't." _

"_She did!"_

"…"

"_What?"_

"_Harry's a lucky man, that's what," Bill answered._

_Teddy shut the door with a jangling of jars as it popped shut. He hopped down and yawned sleepily as he came to rest on the blue striped ottoman._

_The older man had gotten up to check the wards on the windows and doors. They held nicely, strong and imperturbable, it was good work. _

"_Right then, I'll be off Ted. My work is done." _

_Teddy watched him walk to the door; to him it seemed the older man had things on his mind. He could tell by the way Bill carefully picked up his leather jacket and stalled in the foyer of the small flat._

"_Hey, Ted?"_

_Bill scratched at a spot buried under his long hair, not yet turning back to look at Teddy._

"_Yeah?" Ted stopped bumping his boots together and wondering what he was going to do for the rest of the day._

_There was a pause. _

"_Do you want to hear about that thing we talked about earlier? When you asked me if I ever hurt anyone?"_

_Teddy looked up from his boots and tilted his head to the side, taking in the rigidness of the other man's stance. _

_There was no movement to it, no relaxation in the pose._

"_Do you think I should hear it?"_

_Bill looked back at the boy and walked to the couch, he slung his jacket over the back of it and clenched at the fabric, a nervous gesture._

"_I think you should."_

"_Okay then." _

_Teddy looked at him expectant, honest, and so young._

_He took out his pack and sucked in the first drag of a much needed cigarette in the same motion as when he threw the pack onto the table in front of him. The lighter that followed after it slide off onto the wood with a click and clatter._

_Bill smelt the smoke and instantly felt the need to have one himself._

"_You mind if I take one of those?"_

_With a wave of blue hair, Teddy reached forward for the cast away cigarettes and thumbed one out for Bill, looking around for the lighter and not bothering to get it once his eyes found it across the floor, he put the unlit one between his teeth and lit it with the other. _

_He offered Bill the one most recently from his mouth._

_Bill sat on the edge of the couch, running a hand through his hair, unhooking it from his earring, he took a drag and gave Teddy a grim smile knowing what the boy was about to ask._

"_I thought you quit."_

"_Nope, just don't do in front of mum and the kids."_

"_Oh."_

_There was something passing between the two men at that moment that Teddy could feel. _

_Something kindred, maybe._

"_It was after me and Fleur got married. It wasn't even the moon after that, it was after all that. I guess I was run down and angry and I had all this pent up stuff from Fred dying and mum being a mess and Charlie up in Romania and taking down the stragglers who were after the dragons and all that, and, god, Ron was off with Harry and Hermione and none of us knew where, Percy was a right arse, and George…it was like he was just there but that was it, as useful as a three-legged chair, for good reason, of course." _

_He took a shaky drag and composed himself. _

_Teddy ashed onto the floor and sat, rapt already. _

"_Fleur had decided that I was still going to sleep in our bed during the full moon and she said it didn't bother her. And I was stupid. I remember that day mum was especially livid because Charlie got __**pissed**__ and so did George and he started up this big row in the garden and all that shite…," Bill looked at the floor and thumbed the filter of his cigarette._

_The paper sizzled as Teddy inhaled and blew out smoke in a fast stream from the corner of his mouth._

"_So mum flooed me and I came over and broke it up and I remember I was just so feckin' angry because Charlie punched me and George bit me, can you believe that? Little shit bit me! So, yeah…I got home and by then it was late and Fleur in bed and the moon's out and it's just so clear and then it just hit me while I'm getting ready for bed and watching her sleep."_

_Bill didn't even notice his cigarette as ash dropped off onto the floor. Teddy stared at it, he felt at that moment it was better to look at the dirty floor than in the eyes of a man baring his soul._

"_And so then I'm just sitting there, in the chair and watching her. I don't really know why I got on the bed or what the hell I was thinking except for how loud she was breathing and how she smelled."_

_There was a catch and a rattle to his breath._

"_So…I…well, I was rough with her and she made this squeaking sound when I woke her up and…Merlin! It was just like it didn't matter. I didn't care, I just wanted to…"_

_He took a quick drag and rubbed at his face._

"…_anyway when it was over she just says my name, just like nothing has happened and gets up and has a smoke and tells me she's going to make tea, and I just stared out the window at the moon for a long time."_

_He looked up at Teddy and for a second Teddy wonders how he's told him all this without sobbing, because that's exactly what it looks like he wants to do._

_He sucked in a mouthful of smoke blew it out throw his nose, twin pillars of dancing curlicues._

"_So the next morning I wake up and for the first time I know exactly what I've done and she's not in the bed and I get up, and she's there. In the kitchen. Dressed and reading the paper like nothing happened. I sit down and I look at her and she smiles and I see her neck is all bruised from where I bite her and her wrists are a mess from where I grabbed her, and she smiles and says 'good morning' and I just start crying."_

_He looks disgusted with himself. _

_Teddy can understand, as hard as it is to listen he knows it must be harder to tell someone something like this._

"_And she asks me why I'm crying, and by then my head is in her lap and I'm just telling her how sorry I am and how much I want to take it all back and how I'll just leave if she wants me too and that I'll understand if she wants to hex me, or kill me, or leave me. And then she asks me again and I tell her, and I'm not joking, that it's because she'll have to glamour her bruises and she shouldn't have the bruises to begin with. And she just laughs and says 'William it is alright, I can wear a scarf, I've always liked scarves, now stop crying, you will get a hold of it soon enough. I will help you.'"_

_He finished his cigarette._

_Teddy sat back, not knowing what to say._

"_And that's what happened, and after that I cleared out a room and that's where I'd stay during the full moon."_

"_And what did she say?"_

"_She was __**so**__ bloody angry at me, for the room. She said it was ridiculous for me to lock myself away like I was an animal and all that tripe."_

"_What did you do?"_

"_Nothing, she came in after me one night. And she huffed and sat against the wall and said if I was not going to come to bed then she'd come in after me."_

"_What happened?"_

"_Nothing. She's part Veela, after all."_

"_What's that got to do with it?"_

"_A lot, my wife's pretty different when she's angry, Ted. It's different now anyway, she knows what I'm like. It's not my choice anymore, it's hers. Some nights she comes in with me, sometimes she doesn't, she knows what to expect. And it did get better, took time but we got there, I got there."_

_Teddy didn't know what exactly Bill meant and he felt it was not appropriate to ask, and it wasn't as if it was hard to guess at what he was saying._

_The redhead sat back into the couch and looked up at the ceiling through a hazy cloud of smoke._

"_Hey, Ted?"_

"_Yeah?"_

"_How do you feel about tattoos?"_

_The boy did not know how to answer, he said nothing._

"_Because I think it's time you got one."_

_Bill looked at the room's other occupant and gave a toothy grin._

"_Aunt Ginny would __**kill**__ you. But if you really wanna take me I guess I can't refuse," Teddy gave a sly smile to the other man._

"_Pfft, as if I care what __**Aunt**__ Ginny thinks. Let other's decipher your fate by cards, horoscopes, crystal balls, and tea leaves, all you need to worry about it the moon."_

"_What's that supposed to mean?"_

_Bill didn't answer, but rather, put on his coat and started for the door._

"_You coming or not?"_

_Grabbing his pack of cheap fags off the table and scrounging for his lighter half hidden by the couch Teddy climbed over the couch and made it to the door just as it was shutting closed with the other man's exit._


	3. Part 3

Teddy liked London.

It hadn't always been that way but over time he'd gotten used to the rain and the fog and the bagger ladies and while his flat wasn't close to some of his mates, any of his mates really, he found he rather liked walking around what he now considered _his_ city.

The highlands with his Gran were nice, and he liked it there too, but it was too much of the same thing he'd seen for all his life at Hogwarts, the countryside just didn't compare to the city for him.

Though he could do without the smells that the city brought, London smelled rank and the rain only intensified the parfume du vomitus and the bite of urine and garbage from alleys and rain clogged cisterns.

He could have used the floo but Victoire didn't like having people pop up through it, he liked to think it was because she was secretly a nudist but he leaned toward the idea of her just not liking to clean up fireplace ashes when she had bookwork to worry herself with.

And she's had anti-apparation wards up ever since Dominique got her license.

It didn't matter, her lack of wizarding transportation friendly accommodations gave him an excuse to ride his motorbike, not that it was _his_ really, but_ Aunt _Ginny didn't really care for the way Jamie had been eyeing it, and ever since the incident when Albus decided to just "rev it up" she'd been more inclined to give it to Teddy than to leave it sitting around to tempt the children.

Harry had seemed happy to give it to him, going as far as to say it was good someone responsible was going to get some use out of it.

He liked the way it felt under him, the hum and growl of it. Hundreds of pounds of metal maneuvering smoothly, weaving through the blaze of horns and shouted profanities across the asphalt at kilometers over a limit that wasn't enough to lift off but it might as well be.

Saying sod it all to muggle speed limits and the polite rules of society by flipping the bird at every chance given and received by the streaking yellow and white lines and black asphalt.

Sometimes if he'd been feeling especially bold and cheeky he'd stop next to the lorries and rev the engine so it would hum perfectly between his legs and he'd wait just long enough after the light to cut the big red honker off so as to look both dangerous and rowdy.

Taking the long way to her flat he accelerated far further than was acceptable and pushes past a point to which all good boys should adhere.

When he finally relinquished the grip of his thighs from around the cracked leather and polished metal he can swear he can feel his heartbeat in his cock.

It'd been there before he got on the bike, he was tired, lulled to near resting by the almost full moon.

It made his pulse thrum through him, beat a tattoo against his veins, all his veins, but mostly the important ones to a twenty-year old.

It barely bothered him anymore, not really, anyway. It was a mild itch compared to what would come within a few more nights.

But tonight was not the night.

He wouldn't be able to go out tomorrow, but tonight he was going to enjoy what hold he had over himself that made it possible to _not_ fight and fuck without distinction.

Tonight he would play cards and eat liver with a pretty girl, despite the fact she was somewhat haggard looking and cursed up a blue streak to make even Uncle Charlie blush, which Teddy equated with something more of a mannish trait than a delicate sensibility.

All thoughts vanished when he shook the rain off himself on the walk up to Victoire's flat and caught a metallic scented whiff of what was cooking a floor above.

That was another thing about her, he doubted if he ever saw her _prepare_ to cook, she was _always _already cooking by the time he showed up.

He never mentioned when he'd stop by, he just figured for all the times he'd come to visit it was some innate sixth sense she had about those sorts of things.

When to start cooking and when to put on her shoes, when to put up her hair and when to clear her books off the kitchen table , when to hide the piles of dirty laundry on the living room floor and when to dump some of the darker tomes of her book collection into the tub.

He'd know about the book collection, he didn't deny that he was a bit of a sneak, but he wasn't about to admit it either.

She was standing in the doorway, shrouded in the haze of a half-finished cigarette, before he even reached the landing.

"You should wear your helmet. They'll ticket for those sorts of things over here, you know?" She gave him a smile and waved with her cigarette as she followed a not yet disappeared trail of blue smoke back to her stove.

He rolled his eyes and followed her in, noting the way in which she avoided shutting the door on him.

"How do you know I didn't just leave it on my bike?" He asked her, watching as she added something to the sizzle of the liquids in the saucepan she slaved away over.

Flopping over the top of the couch and knocking a stack of neatly laid out papers (and crunching a few more under his arse) he waited for her sassy retort.

Her tone made it clear how she stood, one shoulder raised, a hip jutted, one foot with only heel touching floor and wooden spoon brandished towards the ceiling.

"Because, you parked, as always, in plain sight of the window, which they also ticket for around here, Teddy. Fix my stacks, I had them all organized by date."

He'd already started picking them up from the floor and from under the couch.

"Victoire, I'd be a sad excuse for wizard if I couldn't _charm _my way out of getting ticketed. Ha! Charmed. I made myself chuckle at that one."

In the kitchen a sound very close to a snort was produced. Teddy doubted it was from the liver. It _was_ dead after all.

She had changed. He'd liked her dress, but agreed it was not perhaps the best thing to fry up bloody meat in. Now, her more usual black slacks and crisp white button down were in place. No doubt she was wearing the pair of tiny boots she'd bought in Paris the previous year.

He wondered how many different versions of the same outfit were in her closet.

As he picked up files from the floor he wondered just how many cases she was working on. There was one for a child who'd gotten stuck in a cursed vase, another who'd relocated their mouth to the back of their head, a woman who'd somehow managed to make herself spotted, and a final collection of admission and physical reports for a victim of mauling from a creature Teddy was not familiar with.

When he looked back at her he could tell from the set of her shoulders and the slump of her back that she probably had yet to go to bed.

He wondered if he should mention it.

He wondered if she would listen if he told her not to work so hard.

He knew it was unlikely.

Finally when he'd finished arranging the reports on her cluttered coffee table he rose and took up post on her counter, his heels banging against the cabinets under and his head lounging against the ones above.

"You look tired," he noted.

She elbowed his thigh when she went to flip the meat sizzling in the saucepan.

"I'm fine, dinner will be done soon."

Teddy searched the side of her face for a less curt response, there wasn't one.

"You don't have to rush, I can wait and you don't have to make it all rare, I can eat it cooked," he smiled and pushed the toe of his boot at the spot behind her knee to tease.

Her rhythm of cooking stopped and she lifted her neck to look at him. There was a smile there, tricky and amused. She rolled her eyes and reached her arm behind his bum to snatch at the salt shaker. He did not move.

"Must you plop your arse down on my counter?"

She turned the burner off and shook the salt into the red drainage of the liver and swirled the pan.

"I like watching you cook."

He relit the burner as she took the pan off.

"What are you doing?"

"You shouldn't eat it like that, I feel bad for making you have to cook like that."

She turned the burner off, again, and leaned her hip into the rail of the oven, setting the pan down loudly and putting a hand on her hip.

"I don't cook it like that for _you_. Don't think I spoil you, Teddy Lupin. _I _don't like anything too cooked."

Teddy straightened his head to give her a look that spoke his disbelief in her response without words.

"Why not?" He challenged.

There was a tick in her cheek, her jaw was tight and set into an annoyed clench.

"Because it tastes _dead_. Veelas don't eat dead things, they're birds of _proie, tu piges_?"

Something clicked in his mind, situations coalesced to form a big picture. He _did_ get it.

"Is that why you don't eat at your Grandmother's dinners? Because she overcooks?"

The set of her body relaxed and she turned her attention back to dinner. He assisted in her ignoring of his question by removing plates from the cabinet behind him when she came to stand in front of him.

She took the proffered plates and arranged dinner on them.

When she started to speak again she did not look at him.

"Yes. Me and _maman_ don't like to make a fuss, _grand-maman_ Molly cooks special for papa but she shouldn't have to go through all that trouble for the rest of us. Louis and Dominique don't notice the taste, but they are…," she paused as if thinking what she'd planned to say was not the right thing.

He waited.

She didn't finish her reply until she's placed the plates at their places at the table in the nook by the window.

"They are young, is all. They are not as affected by _it_ as me and _maman_. Now, _we_ eat. _Déguster_."

Her words were clipped at the end; they told him what she would not, that the conversation was over.

Walking away from the table and back to him she swiped him in the knee with the rag that had been over her shoulder. She went to open the fridge.

"Oh! Wait, I brought Odgens this time. I left it by the door, you go sit and I'll get it."

She stopped her motions in time to watch him stretch and hop from the counter, his shirt rising from the act and his stomach bared, she reached out and stoke at a spot on his hip colored by ink.

He stopped moving and watched her fingers trace the roundness of the tattoo, he could feel heat rise from his bones and a familiar throb grow between his legs.

His eyes followed her hand as she took it away.

"I don't think I've seen that before."

Swallowing he looked up.

Behind her glasses her eyes seemed less tired than the rest of her, as if the lag had yet to spread to them.

"It changes to go through the phases of the real thing. Your dad took me to get it." Talk of her father made it easier to control the urge to drag her hand back and slide it lower than just his hip.

_Let the first impulse pass, wait for the second._

He didn't know why the thought sprung so readily to mind but he mentally checked himself to ignore _all_ impulses.

The smell of blood made his eyes lid a bit more heavily and he was suddenly much hungrier than before.

He excused himself to get the Ogden's from where he'd set the bag on his way in.

Hooch always managed to take the edge off.

He poured out each of them a drink in equal portion and set hers down first. Her eyes flashed from the piece of liver speared at the end of her fork to the glass, considering it before swallowing the bite of liver already chewed.

They ate in silence and watched as the rain started again outside the window.

Victoire finished first, she always did. She removed herself from the table and left her glass, she washed her dish but not before running her fingers over the face of the dish, smearing the remnants of fat and blood.

She licked at her red tipped fingers, it was the first time he'd seen her do such a thing and it made his mouth stop moving mid-chew. She did not notice and when she sat down again Teddy said nothing about it. He felt it was not appropriate to point out the action.

Pouring herself another glass she watched him eat with a small smile. She held out her hand.

Teddy made a face at her that made her smile wider, he knew his cheeks were puffed with food and that he must look ridiculous but he rolled his eyes anyway and reached into his pocket for his cigarettes and handed them to her.

The tip turned into a pattern of orange lace as she inhaled, she was facing him but she wasn't looking at him.

She was like that.

Always staring at things over his shoulder, the space in front of his face, as if she couldn't be less interested or like she had so much on her mind or even that she knew she wasn't going to be surprised by anything anyone said so she didn't bother giving them all of her focus.

And it was focus, even with the slim portion she gave out to things besides her papers and self, that made him pay attention.

She looked like someone who everyone knew everything about by just meeting, she looked like a fragile thing, a simple thing.

They were wrong.

She was luxurious and superstitious and slept too scarcely and spoke too harshly, she was solitary and sometimes he thought she was going completely mad and even that much he knew wasn't all that made her up.

The ice in her glass clinked as it melted and shifted. They way she watched him eat did not put him at ease; it was too curious a gaze for a time so close to a full moon. He ignored it as best he could.

It was as if he was doing something greatly interesting to her. She blew out smoke and then closed her eyes and let her chin drop, she took in a drag with teeth biting into the soft filter. He was glad she'd stopped watching him eat.

He finished the remnants of his meal and had a swallow of Ogden's to have something to do.

When he looked up from his drink there was a fresh fag between her fingers, her eyes were open in small slits, tired and knowing in his routine. He took it from her and leaned in to light it off the one in her mouth, she would not let him take her cigarette from her mouth.

Her eyes did not flick open wider when he pressed the butt of his against her lighted one and sucked in smoke.

"So, cards then?" He asked after blowing smoke out against the window pane.

"Of course, I'll take that for you," she reached for his plate and rose from the window bench.

"No, I'll take it," he gripped the plate.

She did not take her hand off the edge and her fingers tightened their grip. His slipped and her face stuck itself into a vision of frozen shock. The luke-warm red drainage bounced up and splattered. She looked right at _him_ and it was there in her gaze, something hot and angry and he wondered without coherent thought if that was the same something in there that ate rare meat and licked blood off her fingers.

Spots soaked into her hair and one settled into the color of her perfectly white shirt and her face was streaked with it. He wanted to apologize and wipe it all away, he would have, if the thought of touching her then, when she bore that burn of rage in her eyes, didn't fill him with a chill of fear.

They didn't speak but he let go of the plate and she went to the sink, he got out the cards from the drawer of the sideboard in her living room that was filled with tiny trinkets and souvenirs from where she'd traveled.

When she came back to the table her face was damp and bits of her hair were wet from her cleaning off the remnants of blood. Teddy had already started shuffling, they made pleasant scritch sounds under his fingers.

She sat down and he dealt.

They drank and played Put for what seemed like an eternity.

She won.

She always won.

And she always wore the same self-satisfied look every time, one hand out with flared fingers and her other arm's elbow up on the table, fist pressed to her temple, a fag between her teeth and lips parted in a clenched teeth smile.

He got not nearly completely pissed, but enough so that he was in no condition to ride off to his own flat. He would take up his familiar place on her couch.

It was dark outside and rain rattled the tiny flat.

"I'm going to get ready for bed, I will set up the couch for you when I am _feneeshed_."

Teddy ignored the slip of her accent.

She rose and he nodded before tossing back the dregs of his last drink for the night. He knew his limit and unlike her own he pushed his to _its_ limit.

They didn't finish off the entire bottle but there wasn't enough for the next time they had dinner.

He settled on the couch once he heard the pipes shudder and the water run from her loo.

Setting up the couch himself and setting her books and papers far out of reach, because he knew if he didn't that he'd swipe them off the short table with his wakeful stretches in the morning, he found himself suddenly very tired.

He wondered how she managed to push past the fog of sleep to stay up and write out reports and medi-witch considerations every night for her obscenely large caseload.

Somewhere between her in the shower and her coming out of it he fell asleep. The scent of her flat lulled him towards dreams, something about the way the haze of cigarettes melded with the ever present violet-scented perfume she wore seeped into the fabrics of her furniture and the wood of the floor.

He awoke to something dripping on the back of his neck, the side of his face, his scalp, it irritated him.

"Why is your hair wet, use a charm Victoire. Honestly." His voice was rough and his tone unamused.

"They make my head itch. Move over, it's still early and I still have work to do, you're in my spot."

Rolling his face off the cushion he snuck a peek at the clock on the mantel of her fireplace to his right.

It was one in the morning. For her it was early. For him it was time to be asleep, but he moved anyway. He let his body roll itself up and over to the other end of the couch.

She seated herself in the spot he had vacated and set her feet up against his thigh and set to work with a vibrant canary yellow quill in hand.

Observing her, he noticed she looked less worn down than she had before, the pink flush of her face from the heat of the shower she'd taken had yet to fade and her skin still steamed slightly in the cooler air of her living room.

Her robe was purple and velvet-like, old and very much like something an old woman would wear, she wore plain socks scrunched down to the ankle and the collar of the plain shirt she wore under showed where the top of the robe parted slightly. It was so very much _her_ style.

Which he wouldn't go so far as to say was no style, but she was the only thing that made anything she wore noticeable.

"I'll be right back."

Victoire nodded vaguely towards him and made a sound in the back of her throat that didn't quite make its way out from between her parted lips where her quill was perched.

He left and came back with a towel and hefted himself onto the top of her couch.

"Come here," He offered her a spot between his legs.

Eyeing him warily she ignored the command and scanned a line, making an annotation and remaining all together stone-like.

Teddy rolled his eyes and tugged away her quill, one of her nails caught on his knuckle and she smiled when he let out a less than bemused hiss.

"Oh come on. You'll drip all over your papers."

He smiled widely.

Hers was wider.

"These are my copies."

He gave her a look and she gave one back.

Finally she shifted and moved to the middle of the couch, her knees popping like knuckles. She crossed her legs and took up her papers again.

Behind her, Teddy felt the urge to drop the towel on her head and over her face but for that she might actually knock him off his perch on the top of the couch and he didn't want stitches so he forgoed the gesture.

Her hair smelled nice as he went about drying it, she seemed not to notice he was even there. He rubbed at the strands and even when pulling his finger through expecting a knot he found himself surprised that it distangled itself with little tugging effort.

He felt a bit peeved that someone who cared so little about how it looked had such nice hair. He wondered what she'd look like with curls, he'd ask but he knew the answer, _'It's too much work for so little an effect.'_

Or something as equally a Victoire thing to say.

"So…," he started.

"_Oui?_"

"You need to take a vacation."

"Ha!"

And then she snorted and he smiled.

"Something feels weird." He smoothed down the back of her hair.

"Like what?" She scribbled in red next to a patient's spell allergy warnings.

He shrugged, and then realized she couldn't see him do it. He shook his head and paused, placed the towel over his knee.

"Like…I don't know. Pressure, the weather, something. It's just like a fog, like if it'd rain it'd be alright."

She stopped writing and raised her head.

"It is raining."

When put that way Teddy felt his comparison was rather absurd.

"That's not what I meant."

"I know."

She lowered her head and he picked up the towel again and combed through her hair from scalp to neck and dried it to damp.

"It's just the moon."

He stopped.

She was only person that said 'moon' so casually around him.

"I'm finished."

"Thank you."

Teddy came around from the back of the couch and Victoire took up her regular spot once again and fixed her robe and reassessed the part she had just read on the paper in her hands.

He sat down and took her feet into his lap.

This time she looked at him, her eyes low against the top ridge of her black rimmed glasses, a warning and a reply, he couldn't resist smiling back.

"What are you doing?"

He leaned back into the couch and closed his eyes and cracked her toes with his hand, she didn't so much a squirm.

Opening an eye he found she was still waiting for him to answer her, he liked having her attention and full on gaze.

It made him feel more important than her files.

"I'm trying to take care of you, since you don't do it yourself."

She tilted her head and studied him, finally she huffed.

"Fine, don't take my socks off, my feet are cold and I'm not about to let you polish my toes."

Teddy scrunched in a laugh.

Victoire pretended not to notice.

"Bring me an ashtray first, though. And my Benson's."

"I think you just don't want me to know you polish your own toenails some tarty shade."

"Well, it's unlikely you'd find out now isn't it?" She smiled down at the paper as she crossed something out with flair and flourish.

Teddy pinched her toe; she raised a solitary brow and remained passive to his ministrations as he went to work. His thumbs pressed circles into the sole of the foot in his hands and she exhaled heavily.

It took time but she relaxed and he noticed it in the set of arms and the way her head tilted lower to her chest and how her hand slowed in its paces across the paper. The tension was washed out of her.

He found himself pressing harder with his fingers; he apologized when he noticed it. She made one last notation on what she was preoccupied with and put the papers down on the table.

Teddy found the curve her body took when she moved to reach the table especially tempting and the way her heel pressed against him as her foot turned almost forced his hips up off the couch.

Victoire looked back at him when she returned to her previous position free of work to do. Offering him her other foot she smiled slowly and closed her eyes, leaning back into the arm of the couch.

If the way he read it right way there could have been a taunt in her eyes.

He repeated the same motions on the other foot and listened to her breathe, watching the rise and fall of her chest.

He matched the rhythm and memorized the way it felt in his chest.

"I t_heenk _it is time for me to go to bed. You will sleep here?"

She pulled her foot out of his lap and turned to sit; she tossed her hair and looked to him for a response.

He swallowed.

His chest felt tight.

"Yeah, I'll get the blankets from the closet." He remembered something. "Sorry I forgot to get your smokes."

A look passed over her face and disappeared fast. She'd forgotten that she'd even asked.

"It _ezz_alright, I'm too tired to smoke now. Goodnight, Teddy."

She got up and untied her robe, laying it across a chair as she padded to her bedroom in socked feet. Teddy found himself transfixed by the curve of her arse in modest white cotton shorts, a fraction too long to be considered alluring.

He didn't realize he'd been staring at it until she closed her bedroom door.

"Oh! Night, Vic!" He shouted at the door, shaking himself out of the mood.

Getting up he found himself standing at the table where they'd eaten dinner and played cards and talked mindless shite for the majority of the night.

He sat down and ran a hand through his hair, he pushed out a breath harder than necessary and quickly found himself boring a hole into her pack of Benson's with his eyes.

Taking one out and lighting it he breathed in the smoke that blended so nicely with her own scent.

Suddenly angry he slapped the fags off the table and across the floor.

He stabbed the one in his mouth out in the ashtray with violence making his hand heavy.

Later after he caught himself sitting and doing nothing but think things he shouldn't be thinking and making up a bed on her couch with the sheets and spare pillow from the linen closet he flopped down and tried to sleep, he left the light on, not trusting the dark to keep his less than savory thoughts in check and out of action.

He could smell her on the couch, he rubbed his face into the spot where she'd sat and found his mind turning to thoughts of white cotton shorts wrapped around one ankle and the feel of socks banging against his bare arse.

Burying his face into the cushion was undeniable, falling asleep wasn't.

He left before he found himself unable to and even though he'd exited as quietly as he thought possible in the moment before he revved his motorbike to life he found himself looking up at her living room window and found the orange glow of a cigarette there, bright against the white of the gauzy curtains.

Her face was angled up at the sky, at the almost full moon.

Teddy looked down when she did, to avoid the look she would give him, to avoid everything she could say with it.

When he did look up thinking she was gone, she wasn't and he stared back in silent standoff.

Her eyes were dangerous and he wondered if his looked any different. Her features were casted in orange when she inhaled, She looked up again and back at him, pointed with her cigarette to the moon, and with an infuriatingly dismissive gesture let the curtain waft back into place.

He snarled at the window so easily it cleared his mind and affirmed the choice he had made to leave that much more solidly.

Letting the bike roar to life he took off and after going at a much too fast to his own flat, chain-smoking the rest of his pack, and wanking himself into a dumb stupor was he able to calm the tightness in his chest and the burn in his blood.


	4. Part 4

"_A hawk with talent hides its talons"_

_Winter Holidays, 7__th__ Year (2 years ago)_

_She' d never been so hungry in her life. _

_The family dinner had been less than satisfying both in meal and company. It all tasted overcooked and her father had been called away earlier in the day and her mum had left with Louis because he thought it appropriate to be a brat about everything._

_Dominque was sick._

_Andromeda was late._

_Teddy sent an owl saying he'd be there later in the evening. _

_It was cold even with the warming charm cast around her, but despite the cold she was still outside. It was not worth the risk of getting caught and the tongue lashing her mum would get if her grandmother caught her smoking out the window._

_He must have thought he was being sneaky, she could tell by the measured way he was walking across the snow, when he spoke up she was waiting for it._

_That tone of chastisement was expected._

"_Molly would kill you."_

_She smiled into the cloud of smoke she blew out and looked behind her with her cigarette clenched between her teeth._

"_**Grandmere**__ is sleeping. Had two sherries, it __**es**__ safe to say she is out for the night. Hello, Teddy."_

_He lit up a fag of his own and smiled down at her._

"_How did you know it was me?"_

"_Eagle Eyes. I put one of '__**eem**__ by the back door. You can sit I put a weave down on the snow."_

_She gestured at the spot next to her and waved a small curved lens glass at him. Teddy took it from her hands and stared at the image in it, it showed the back of the burrow and footsteps in the snow._

"_Guess you saw me slip then, yeah?" He shrugged himself further into his coat._

"_Very graceful." She tapped the rubber soles of her boot heels together. _

"_I like your laces."_

_They were red. _

"_Thank you." _

_They didn't speak for some time. Not until she took her smoke out of her mouth and turned her head on her bare knees to look at him. _

_Teddy didn't look back, just stopped mid-drag to turn his eyes a fraction of a bit towards her. He leaned a hand back and clenched cold snow between his fingers and gave her a grin._

_She flipped a tassel hanging off her hand-made hat in his direction and smiled a small smile back at him._

"_You'll catch a cold."_

_He carefully avoided looking at her legs, half-bared and covered with gooseflesh from where the hem of her white nightgown wasn't._

"_I didn't feel like getting dressed just to sneak outside. It's not too bad."_

_She pulled the edges of her tanned leather, fur hemmed jacket tighter across her chest._

"_You haven't answered my owls."_

_He sucked in smoke after he let out the veiled accusation. _

"_I've been busy."_

_He blew it out past red and raw chapped lips._

"_Is that all?"_

_She gave him a look and remembered her cigarette as it dropped off ash on her knuckle, she ignored it._

"_Yes."_

"_I thought you were angry at me, for what happened at the station. I knew I shouldn't have gone out."_

_She took a drag herself and choked on it. _

_Coughing it out before she looked at him she wondered if her father had cornered him after what happened at the beginning of term. _

_The thought was not soothing._

"_I understand. And, yes, you shouldn't have been out on the day of the full moon. I imagine it must be hard to control your…urges. Did papa…do anything, after I left?"_

_Teddy laughed hard and husky into the cold night with an acrid smoke cloud forming in the frosty air._

"_Yeah, he was a bit peeved. He asked if I had had sex with you."_

_He paused._

_She waited._

"_I said 'I haven't touched her,' and he goes 'I wasn't asking about your hands,' but it was alright, in the end. Guess maybe I should have dealt with Jamie before he ran off and told everyone he saw us __**snogging**__, huh?"_

_Victoire nodded and looked up at the sky, it was clear. She couldn't sleep on nights when a moon didn't hang heavy in the sky. _

_She didn't tell him how she had woken up from a dream of three women with oiled and slicked bodies with the heads of birds and wings instead of arms, claws instead of feet, with their wet eyes watching her and their rank smell marking the air. _

_She wouldn't tell anyone about the way it set something stirring inside of her that made her __**have**__ to come outside to see the sky._

"_I'm not angry with you." She put out her half-dead cigarette that was already sputtering weakly. _

_Burying the butt with her boot she tried not to let the smile forming behind her lips show._

"_Goodnight, Teddy. I'm glad I got to see you before I went on holiday with mama." _

_She leaned closer and brushed her lips against his cheek. _

_Her dream had made her bold, and beneath her cold skin her blood raced, spiked with fear and something savage that mixed her emotions into something heady._

_He shuddered at the cold touch of her pout against his still warm skin. His shiver bumped her mouth and she pulled back pressing a hand to it._

"_I'm sorry," when she says it they both know it's not an apology, it can't be because it wasn't an accident, and they both know that too._

_When she gets up to leave so does he, she gives him a look and he gives one back._

"_What do you mean 'holiday?'"_

_She pauses and chews a strip of skin off her lips, red bubbles at the slice._

"_I'm not staying, I'm leaving. I want to go home, mama wants to go to Paris, and I didn't want to before, now I do."_

"_Why?" He feels that it is because of him, but it can't be because he knows she wouldn't tell him if it was, wouldn't even bring it up._

"_I can't sleep here, it's…uncomfortable, for me. I like to be home. That's all." _

_She looks tired, as if she hasn't slept much. _

_He wouldn't be surprised._

"_So you're going then?"_

"_Yes. I am. I'm going to leave a note, and pack. I'll use the floo. I'm too tired to apparate."_

"_I'll take you." _

_When she looks at him, standing there in the snow and smelling of smoke he can't help but understand something is ending between them. It is the moment where they are something else than what they were, in the cold he sees an era of childhood ending, feels it. The girl he'd fallen so hard for years before is no longer there._

_Something had changed._

_That girl didn't say goodbye but the farewell is understood, even though he's just noticing it now._

_She is different than at that moment, and he doesn't know how or why but he figures it has something to do with the way she's suddenly taken up late nights and cigarettes, she's older. She understands herself, not found, but uncovered what was there all along. _

_They go inside and he waits in the kitchen while she packs up her duffel and dresses in her denims and a soft white sweater. _

_Her boots are the same and so are the bags under her eyes. _

_In the dim light of the room while sitting on the scrubbed wood table, watching her pour hot mint drinks for them both out of the kettle he'd silenced, he notices a shimmer around her._

_He wonders why she's wearing a glamour and why she would need to, but he doesn't ask because she's a girl and girls do those sort of things, even late at night when everyone is supposed to look their worst. _

_Hell, he thinks, she still looks like bad weather and tired eyes._

_They drink their teas and don't speak._

_She looks at herself in the hall mirror as she writes a note for her grandparents to find in the morning. _

_The note is terse and signed with a __**V**__ and fakely heartfelt apologies for not staying longer. _

_The reflection in the mirror, to her, not the beauty everyone makes so much of, is just her face covered with the shine of glamour to cover what the sky, empty of moon, does to her._

_He picks at the bowl of chocolates on the counter as he waits for her. _

_The uneaten confections drive the fact that Molly and Arthur are all too suddenly __**old**__ home. They keep the candy there for the children that frequent the house, not for themselves._

_When she comes into the kitchen he takes her surprisingly light duffel and apparates them just outside the wards of Shell Cottage._

_They look at each other and find themselves both surprised by the lack of snow around them. _

_Silently she takes his hand and smiles at him and they walked. They walk along the garden paths and right up to the edge of the woods and back again to the seemingly small house. _

_She looks at the lights inside and turns away from them and takes him with her._

_They sit in the garden and watch the sky and talk for a very long time. And despite the lateness of the hour and the heat of hand in hand they are still just pals. _

_Teddy stares at her face, her mouth is black in the dim light and he can smell the, by then, stale scent of her bloodied lip. _

_Her gaze is leagues away, somewhere in the sky, staring at the stars and beyond them at the one thing that isn't there that night._

_They do not talk until dawn or anything as overdone as that, but they do grin at each other and walk back, loping and whimsically to the cottage, her nails scratch at his fingers but she does not complain of the chill the breeze carries. _

_The sodium yellow lamp-light from her porch gleams off the metal in his eyebrow and lower lip. _

_She laughs at him and it is raspy, a snort comes and then a cough because girls like Victoire don't giggle or anything so silly. _

_They laugh, long and shaky because she is as much one of the boys as his mates are._

_He doesn't wonder why she laughs because he feels it. It's a private joke he's not privy to, it's something sacred that he wouldn't for anything ask to know about. _

_The world is visible and colorless and somehow everything seems dull and fuzzy-edged. _

_Everything except for her. _

_He wonders if she thinks the same about him._

_Victoire takes and lights up the cigarette he'd had tucked behind his ear and points at the sky with the orange tip and laughs again. She shakes her head at the look of confusion that crosses his face._

_They do not say goodnight. _

_They say nothing. _

_There is nothing left to say. _

_Nothing left that they can say that the other can't guess at or isn't thinking themselves._

_It is a night that cannot be repeated because it is pregnant with so many things that they didn't say and didn't do, and it is perhaps because of such things that it is a night neither will forget. _

_She walks inside._

_He apparates away._

_When he wakes up the next morning in his own bed he finds he cannot remember half of what they had talked about, like a language learned in dreams or a dance danced while asleep. _

_The aftertaste of something important lingers at the edges of his mind, it doesn't matter because he knows it will come back to him eventually. _

_Like déjà vu, and by then he'll wonder where it was that such a thing came from. _

_And he thinks one can't have it both ways, he doesn't know quite what that means but it doesn't matter because his head fell back into the pillow and his body into asleep again. _


	5. Part 5

"_There is a beast in man that needs to be exercised, not exorcised"_

_2 Days before the Full Moon_

He was trying to work but thoughts came unwanted, and so he stopped working and started admitting that he'd never been working in the first place just sitting.

Setting the paper of a badly planned broom model alight he sighed and scrubbed a hand over the scraggly stubble he'd allowed to grow over night and into the day.

Back when they'd been in school he'd seen her practice on the pitch, hair braided back, face streaked with red and mud, arms finely muscled and taut as she launched a bludger across the sky.

He was sixteen and had fallen for her like a drunk from a broom.

Slowly he grew fed up with himself because he'd never noticed before and it was the middle of the night and the moon that made him realize that suddenly he minded when he hadn't before. Noticing it was acknowledging it and it clicked like an arithmancy combination that just suddenly gave you an answer you hadn't been able to come up with on a test that was lessons ago.

Thinking on it he knew why her father had been so frank with him, and there was a point he had never really known the other man had been trying to make, or maybe he hadn't known he was making it himself, as if he'd been unable to put his meaning into words.

Teddy was sure Bill Weasley loved his wife, would die for her, fight for her, kill over her. It was passion and rage and fear and want.

And it was with no doubt that he knew for Victoire he'd die hard if she even asked for it, but he knew he'd hurt her just as hard if given the chance because with all the fear of it and for it the fear had brought companions: want and lust, and Teddy didn't know which sounded better.

Especially not as he sat absently running a palm across a quickly hardening cock at the idea of her bloodied and bruised and bitten, begging and bending for him, to him.


	6. Part 6

"_Women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage…- but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away"_

_1 Day before the Full Moon_

"Oh! _Manifique, parfait_!"

"It is _chouette, Maman._"

Fleur scoffed with a small smile that Victoire could see in the mirror as her mother brushed through her hair and fixed the sparkling pins into it.

Ever since she'd been little her mother had loved to play with her hair. Victoire had outgrown the liking of it but she knew that Dominique couldn't, or wouldn't sit long enough to let their mother play with hers. She'd gone so far as to cut it so short it made her small pretty face seem boyish.

Louis had bitterly scowled ever time his mother's hands moved towards his tiny rosy curls, Victoire suspected it had sprung from the way Dominique chuckled if she was around to see it.

So Victoire let her mother preen her and coo over her and titter on about how she picked over her food and stayed up too late and slept too little and smoked too much while she brushed and arranged.

"I 'ear _Eddy _and _leetle_ Jamie came to _vesit_," her mother's smile was knowing.

Victoire stared her mother's reflection down until the smile grew wide on the older woman's face.

"I just _thenk _'at you and _'eem_ are good friends. Your Papa es not so 'ure."

"Papa should mind his own business and not worry about Teddy so much."

"You should _erry_ more."

"I am not so little, maman."

"I know."

Her mother's expression was hard in the mirror. Victoire had no response for her.

"'Eddy is not like 'our papa. And you are not me. _Tu piges_?"

"_Oui_."

Her mother nodded without looking up from her ministrations on her hair.

"I worry. But I should not. Et is not good. For you, to 'ave us all worry. _Et_ is not 'ight. I _'ood_ not 'ave me worry for me. So I will not worry 'or you."

"I'm not delicate maman."

And Fleur looked up, sharp and serious to stare at her in the mirror.

"I know; you are 'ard and 'ean. And most like you 'ill 'urt _Teedy_ because you are a 'ean one. But _et_ is alright because I thenk he is more_ deleeceet _than you."

"I'll be gentle with him," Victoire snorted.

Fleur's frown was not noticed.

"I 'ope you _wheel_."

It was after her mother left the room to let her get dressed that Victoire turned things over in her mind and found herself growing angry. She watched herself in the mirror, running a hand over her hair with the fierce urge to rip all the pins and decoration from it. She shook off the idea and inhaled so deep made her chest tight and heavy.

She explores the urge and studies it, carefully, knowing that she is not herself, not as she usually is. Her papa has a wolf's blood and she always gets testy and short right along with Dominique and Louis and him.

But there is a violent revulsion to it in herself, at it taking from her everything that was given by mother and grandmother and great-grandmother before her_ to_ her.

It is being more than just a witch and a bit of something else; she is not a _bit_ of Veela, just like Teddy is not a _bit_ of a werewolf.

Her siblings are a bit of Veela, a bit of wolf. But her siblings never met great grand-maman like she did.

But now with Teddy becoming more of what makes him so edgy as the sky fills she feels less of what she was born to and had things sacrificed for, what _she_ sacrificed for.

She is the furthest from what she loves to be as Teddy becomes more of what he hates. It heats her insides and glazes the world under a shade of rage at the thought of him hating it so much, himself, his nature and it feels a lot like rejection of her in that refusal to accept his own blood his own nature.

How he can embrace everything except what makes him feel things so much more deeply and makes things so much more difficult. How he wants nothing else but to ignore it and hide it and keep it close but never close enough to own and accept and reign over.

Maman understands and Papa through his own meeting with that side of her maman, but no one has noticed Victoire is different from her mother or even grand-maman Faustine.

And it is now with Dominique and Louis that the rarity of blood is thinned to the consistency of water. More wolf than Veela. And she is left alone, has _been_ alone in what she is and feels and understands and she has grown to like it and relish it.

Victoire hates these times, the moon _pulls_ such things from her and away from her in the same night's span. She finds that her papa's shading has coated her and she can understand why Teddy will not visit her, why he denies her from seeing him, a denial she has always allowed him to keep.

There is fury then, the terrible frustration and bone grinding agitation that she can control at any other time and examine detachedly, curious and sharp-eyed.

She is older now and does not like to be treated like she is a silly girling because he should understand it, but he does not because he doesn't _want_ to. Doesn't even try.

Normally she can't pin down what it is that the full moon truly does to her, if anything other than make her a complete 'twat' in Dominque's opinion.

She knows it now as she steps on the hem of the pretty and gauzy dress and yanks, the sound is soothing as it rip widens.

It is childish and she would never have given into the urge of doing it otherwise but her mood was not tempered with the coolness it usual had, it is just for that reason that she can even go out with her maman, she does not draw attention as she normally does. She does not make people sick with fear or draw close from an interest so hazed it makes _her _sick, sick to deal with and send away.

A spell fixes the dress but does not rob her of her realization.

There is much of her mother in her in that she does not like to be ignored, and burns with indignation at refusal when she is so justified to have acquiescence.

On the vanity is the only picture of great-grand-maman Zéphyrine.

Small and slight and sharp looking. Fierce eyes and strong teeth and her beauty is that of beasts, but beauty all the same. It is there in Victoire's own face which she never really looks but that her mother examines with fervor.

Maybe because maman Fleur has been offered it once, a gift from Victoire's great-grand-maman but her grand-maman had refused it and Victoire's mother remembered with bitterness how she had not been able to continue with what was supposed to be hers once, a legacy.

Grand-maman Faustine considered herself a witch firstly styling herself after her father who was a great wizard.

Grand-maman was scared of what her mother Zéphyrine was and when she had offered what she'd given Victoire to Fleur it was not declined with a gentle hand but anger and fear and confusion.

So it was never offered again to Fleur. But when great-grand-maman Zéphyrine was still so very alive and set on the idea when Victoire was born it was offered again and Fleur had known what it was to make a choice of the hardest order. But she did it with a smile and absolute clarity.

Victoire loved her mother with a fierceness she knew would never dull for allowing her to choose for herself.

From that it may have been ingrained in her that not being able to choose for herself in _everything _was the worst slight someone could inflict upon her. It was like having her will stripped and it stung.

There were so few things she couldn't choose but what lay most heavily on her mind was not one of them. If Teddy Lupin wished to treat her as a child so be it. But if anything Victoire had not been a child to sulk; that had been Dominique, or cry and wail; which had been Louis.

She'd been one to take her beatings for doing what she'd been told not to and roll her eyes when she'd gotten away with it sans punishment. There should be repercussions. Give and take.

Her mother was tapping her heel in the hall growing irritated with how long Victoire was taking to get ready to go out to dinner.

She was careful to not get the hair pins stuck on the dress as she pulled it on and straightened the perfectly even hem around her knees.


	7. Part 7

"_It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts."_

_First Day of the Full Moon_

He knows that she is there, can hear her, smell her, _sense_ her that much more sharply. He can feel her amusement through the door from all the way across the flat's small living room.

And he walks to the door, pressing a hand against the wood and grinds the harshness against the pads of his fingers while he tells her to go.

Her scoff is audible.

"You would think since I spawned from a curse-breaker and a charms expert that you wouldn't even bother warding me out. But if you persist it's going to take me until the sun goes down to open this door…,"

She paused as if challenging him to say otherwise, her silent 'and it will be opened,' was left unsaid but he understood all the same.

"I don't care when I break down your wards, but you will. I'm _zure_."

He waved a hand and let her walk in, knowing she felt the magic disperse from the wood as soon as the ward left it, feeling himself shiver and tighten in anticipation that he wanted no part of.

"Say what you want and _leave._" He turned from her and strode across the flat, putting distance up that was more for show than anything else.

Her face is devoid of everything, and there is nothing that shows him why she insisted on this.

"You can't ward me out. You won't leave here. You can't."

He is angry that she knows, furious that she'd throw it in his face as if imprisonment instantly means that he is some weak-willed _thing_.

"Why did you leave? Because you _zeenk _you are so uncontrollable? Or because you think I'm some fragile, stupid girl that 'asn't noticed?"

The tone is measured but there is something behind it, barely leashed and held in check and he can see it written on her body, in every line and curve and muscle and word. For a moment he wishes he was a part of her every line and curve and muscle and word.

"You can _try_ to make me leave, but I _weel _break every spell you throw up."

Victoire has always been stubborn but so has he.

He turns on her and his lips twist into something vicious at the coolness etched so deeply into her.

"Then if you won't leave I'll have your father come and drag you out. Don't push your luck or think I wouldn't."

Her cool features crack and falter for a moment and the snarl she almost threw at him stirs something primal and hot into his blood from the air.

"Because you _theenk_ I can't make my own choices about you?"

Her posture is stiff, offended.

"Because you have _**no **_idea what those _choices_ mean. Stop being so bloody thick. What is it you want, Victoire? This? Me as a fucking animal? In here, like this, you know _nothing!_ I'm not a pet, or your friend when I'm like this. This isn't you being a good friend by being here and staying with me, it's you being a dumb fucking bint. So go. I'll see you in a few days," Teddy feels old and tired as he says what everyone, including himself thinks about her being around him.

Outwardly she is calm but he knows her well enough to see the tempest there under the surface in the way her knuckles had turned white from her rigid grasp on the chair's fabric, and the sudden wideness of her eyes, the shape of her jaw.

"You and I are not friends, Teddy. It wasn't my _friend_ that left in _ze _middle of the night and I didn't show up now because it is what a _friend_ would do. I know why you left, and you know why I'm 'ere," she explains with a weary tone, accent slipping and a somnolent look, like a tired professor might explain something to the last student of the last lesson of the day, as if the effort to say it is so much because she shouldn't have to say it because it's obvious.

He doesn't like that look or that tone, it is entirely too comfortable. She shouldn't ever look or sound like that around him.

"You know why I left? Because after you walked away to go off to sleep I laid there and thought about how _easy_ it would be to pull you out of bed and fuck you, these past days I've thought about it in ways that make me sick at how much I didn't care a single bit about if you'd like me to or not."

She shifts and he notices she is slumped and loose in the movement.

"So? You act like I 'aven't known because it's something you've hidden so well. I know what _et_ looks like, _et_ is there when you speak and when you watch and when you move. Tonight it may come out without you trying to hide it or speak over it or ignore it, but _et_ is _always _there."

"You have no idea what I'm like, Victoire. Not a single fucking clue."

"I know exactly what you are like, Teddy."

"Go," he looks at her with a foulness in his features that narrows his eyes and hardens his jaw.

"...," and finally she has no answer for him because she is tired of answering for why she has come and won't waste words if there is no need.

"This isn't the time to prove that you're not a little girl."

But there is no answer, just her eyes tracking his and measuring his movements.

"Why did you come?"

He comes around to the chair opposite her own and lets his hand slide and clench along the fabric and her gaze moves to them, lazily and slowly. It's the same way he gazes at her sometimes before he remembers himself enough to stop it.

"I know why you_ think_ you came."

She won't be riled by that alone. He can imagine several reasons why she came but none of them are hers. There are reasons that he'd like to believe are hers but he can't pin them to her that easily, and he knows she knows that he'd never know her reasons for sure without her telling him.

But the bluff is still there.

Slowly her face rises and her eyes, like the night when they'd had dinner as she'd tried to take the plate from him her eyes are fierce and she keeps it bound on tether so tight that he thinks on the day it snaps whoever does it won't be around anymore.

He wishes that now is the moment it snaps and she leaves and he never has to be in a room alone with her again, wishes she'd hex and curse and spell him into oblivion and tiny pieces.

"Don't believe like you can hurt me worse than I can hurt you," she states, easily.

Teddy does not know why she is so confident in it, she shouldn't be. But she is.

"I've thought about hurting you."

He only says it because it's the truth and he's already told her about wanting to drag her out of bed and wanting to fuck her, so there should be no harm in saying all the rest. She's still sitting there and he's not making her leave or calling Bill Weasley to make her leave and whatever there was inside coiled so tight is spinning and sloshing against his insides calmly and vitally.

She nods as if she understands; Teddy thinks that if anyone understands it's her. When he walks towards her that gaze always on him doesn't change because she's still watching just as closely, always will be.

He touches her hair and he can smell the violets and the smoke, and muses that with the constant haze of cigarettes she sits in the middle of that it has seeped as deep into her hair as it has her lungs. He is close but she makes no move to accommodate him as a hand curls at the top of the chair and he leans over her with a knee next to her hip on the cushion, his other hand clenching her hair.

"Ever think about how bad it would hurt if someone just yanked on your hair to get you to arch back? How hard would they have to pull, hard enough to get a few tears out of you, maybe a whimper or maybe that grunt you make when you run into a corner?"

She says nothing and he drops her hair back onto her shoulder and moves fingers across her collar bone, neck, and shoulder, sliding down her ribs, to a hip that he squeezes, rubbing a thumb over skin not covered by denim.

"How about how hard a slap or a fall or a bite would have to be to leave a mark? You've always bruised easy, and you've always rubbed at them. Did you know that?" He smiles slowly and catches her eyes but there is nothing in them that belays fear.

Not yet.

"Since school, you could be doing nothing but poking at one and staring at something for an entire night. If I bruised you bad enough would you still rub at it?"

He reaches for a hand, runs a soft finger over the tops of her nails and grins down at them.

"What if I fucked you raw and didn't let go of your hands the whole time? Would you twist these pretty little fingers and try to get at me with them? Would you try to tear me apart?"

His eyes are still staring down but his mouth is twitching up and those eyes follow. He raises her hand close to his mouth as if to press her fingers to his lips. His hand tightens and she feels the bones grind together. Her mouth does not open to cry out or tell him to stop gripping it so hard. Her knee rubs harshly against his own and she presses it tighter and tighter to the side of the chair.

When he looks at her she is looking back.

"Yes."

She says it simply and honestly because it is easy and true to say it.

"Why?"

And that part of him is coming back, the part that thinks her something worth sheltering from another part of him that wants no part of being kept smothered.

It is the part of him that wants to know but doesn't believe her answers because he doesn't try to understand.

"Because you'd let me do _ze_ same to you, because you could take it if I did."

Suddenly she feels so wan and debilitatingly tired that the fog he'd thrown himself into for a few moments is lifting and the iron-strong gates of control that he believes himself to have are slamming down around everything.

But something that is there that he relishes and revels in heard her, felt her, even if he'd rather keep it cloistered close and reigned in tight.

He lets go of her hand and backs up off the chair she's sitting in to fall back into the other, a hand rubbing over his face, his eyes.

It is a version of him she doesn't think she's ever seen before sitting there devoid of any outrageous coloring or decoration. It is him when he leaves that other part of himself behind as the moon gets closer.

He's all sharp angles and dull colored hair and plain brown eyes. Savage looking and wild and wolf-like. There are circles under his eyes and his lips are rough and chapped and his hair is longer than her father's.

But she doesn't know if he's ever managed to stir her as much as she is now.

But she's different too, now.

And he notices.

Her hair is loose and pretty and a different color, it's so light a tint of red that he almost doesn't notice but it's there, transforming the platinum into something the slightest shade of rosy gold.

She is dressed with the same precision as always but she's wearing denims which he hasn't seen since school and her shirt rises the slightest of bits when she breathes at the bottom to flash perfect skin at him.

Her scent has something to it that makes him want to preen against her skin, she smells kindred even though he can't pick it out from the violets and smoke smell of her, he can taste it thick in his mouth and skull, layering itself to the back of his eyelids, coating his teeth and gums and glazing over his skin.

He can swear he feels it tugging at his cock, laving at it, trying to soothe, but only inflaming in the most infuriatingly perfect sodding way like he knows her mouth or cunt would be.

She seems so much more there than she usually is, she is not some_ thing_ who has mechanizations and motives and movements she's become something full fleshed and alive.

She's something he wants so bad it aches like a scrape.

He knows it's only partly because she's her and that most of it is in the way she looks at him with a challenge in her eyes, like he and her are in competition, he doesn't quite understand what she's hoping to win, why she even bothers to hope she can, but he's more than willing to answer the challenge with his teeth and hands and cock.

"Why won't you leave?"

Her expression is hard but her eyes are soft.

"Because I don't have to."

"Don't get overconfident, if I wanted something bad enough I'd take it from you."

She shrugs.

"It's not as if you don't want it, you just don't want to take it under certain terms even _eef_ it's offered. You don't like to be like _zis_, but you are and you hate to_ theenk_ anyone could like both instead of one over the _oder_."

"I'm not me, not now. You fucking know that!"

She shakes her head and her eyes are no longer soft and nice.

"There are not two of you, there is one. You are not different when the moon is out or when it's not. You are Teddy, always_._ You think because I am _zer_ only when you want to be _zer_ it means that I am choosing when it is you making the choice."

"This isn't something to prove yourself over, Victoire."

"No, but I am here because I want to be, because you've always wanted me here."

He can't help himself. He rises, hard, throwing himself from the chair and stalks the short distance to her. She is calm but there aren't many moments before he yanks her by an arm up for her to even start to become wary of him.

His grip is hard and his fingers can feel the muscles of her arm rub together as he pulls and tightens his grasp. She does not pull her arm from him or try to put space between them; rather she tightens, coiled and ready to spring.

Teddy isn't sure where she'd spring to but there are only really the options of farther from him or closer and there is a war in his thoughts that is trying to decide which is better for him, her, them.

The path his feet end up taking them both is the door of his flat but when he feels her nails against his knuckles scratching in a delicate and sharp way his mind is a haze and as good as it would feel to throw her out his door it feels better to have their teeth clink together painfully and loudly as his lips chap hers with their roughness and his tongue slides wetly across her gums and presses against hers soft and warm.

It feels languorous, cloying but it is prompt and violent, it's the wait for it that has made it feel like it does and look entirely different.

The glide of her tongue across his palate jerks and pulls on his strings and his awareness. He pushes and she hits the wood behind her, chest heaving and red splashed across her cheeks. It's the way he's wanted to kiss her since the day she left for Hogwart's without him, the way he _had _wanted to, was _going_ to but he hadn't and he didn't but now he'd made up for lost time and it sent him back to himself and away from her.

"Leave."

"No."

"Now. The su…-"

"Will go down long before you get a good enough grip to throw me out yourself."

He sits on the floor and punches his thigh. Aroused and agitated in the same breath by one woman and every single one of her actions.

When she goes to sit she doesn't smile because she has not won anything, merely confirmed what has always been there, what she has always known, she doesn't have a victory, just an affirment to a now shared suspicion.

As the sun goes down she is silent and he wants to sob like a child, he feels the spells and the wards and the charms root themselves into the wood so deep it's as if it has become stone, unupheavable and permanent for a night at the very least.

Taking in her image and measuring exactly where she is sitting he aims carefully, measures the distance exactly, times her movements, factors in the furniture and with just the right flicks and bobs sends her flying over the couch, across the living room and into the room whose door is marked with runes and sealed with blood, he's not sure if she saw his wand and let him cast but it doesn't matter much either way.

The smack of her body off the wall or floor or whatever stopped her makes him cringe and the sound the breathe makes as it rattles out from around her ribs and in her chest has him making a face that probably would mirror her own if he was watching.

He walks and looks in to make sure she's not about to get up while he remarks the runes on the arch of the door.

Biting at the spot between thumb and forefinger he reaches up and in pressing the crescent shape of welling blood into the frame then at the bottom he drags the bloodied thumb across the floor.

The spell is simple and if she wants to stay, so be it. She can see and be done with it.

When he raises his head she is watching him. Glaring, she rubs at her shoulder.

"I'm sorry."

Though he isn't, not really.

"Just because you can't come in, doesn't mean I can't come out."

He sighs and shakes his head because he can't tell her not to, can only hope she doesn't.

"But I won't, not without having you ask for it."

The thought of it makes his hand shake and he has to grip his wand tighter to stop her from being able to see it, because there's something in him waiting to tell her to do just that.

Biding its time.

Her hand waves and the door clicks shut, gently like a kiss or a smile or some sweet goodbye that doesn't really make anyone want to leave.

It's the type of goodbye that isn't one, the type that can and has broken a man's reserve and will easily and just as gently.

The room was dark and there was nothing in it except her. She had worn no watch but she knew with precision that hours had passed; she had felt them marked by the way he moved outside the room.

The sound of his bare feet padding in front of the door like a soft heartbeat for the first few weak hours she was in the room. His resolve was slipping as the moon went up.

The shadow that grew bigger under the crack between door and floor as he moved closer and farther away as his curiosity grew and waned.

And then the shadow and the pacing had disappeared and stopped, retreated as he moved to the window. His steps sounded louder, less tense, the measure of them instinctual and ingrained in him.

She knew where he was standing, what he was staring out at, the image that formed in her mind was, she knew, exact and as true as what she would find if she opened the door. He would be languid and nude and fierce, she'd heard the slump of his shoulder against the window and the way his clothes hit the floor as he shucked them off and the rasping snarl his throat let escape once.

Standing she walked to the door and then away from it, along the wall, stopping when she knew that if she pressed as hand to it that he could do the same and there'd be just that between their skins.

There were steps and a pause and then a slap against his side of the wall, she closed her eyes and ran her fingers across and down knowing he knew she did it, followed it.

It wasn't hard to change her scent, just practice that she had perfected a long time ago. She could only do it when there was a full moon when there was even something to change it into. The yanking of magic in her blood is stronger one way than the other but if she tugs on the bit that is like Teddy it drifts out in front of the other.

Like the foaming of the sea that hits the shore first.

And he can smell it now, the scent that isn't normally there, the one that is more kindred and not so off-putting as the Veela in her that won't be so easily tamed by a hand that isn't hers.

That is why he does not want her to stay; he wants to conquer something of his own kind, not rail against something that isn't.

Victoire can understand, predators prey, and there can be no compromise without submission at a time like this.

She walks and he follows the trail of her hand behind her, stopping when she shifts her scent to rile his irritation because she also knows when faced with a growling wolf one should not sing to it they should run or growl back.

So she's growling back with a slim smile and a trailing hand because she also know wolves don't like easy prey, and she's never known how to be prey in her life, never had the reason besides now and it ripples her nerves like wind through water.

The wolf scent of her rises out again and he has started to walk along the wall after it, the drag of his hand along it audible. A mimicry of a chase that won't really start unless she walks out of the room.

And so she continues her pattern back and forth, not because it amuses her but because it is nothing less than what he expects her to do. She wants to make an inferno bank in his blood, because she is more than capable of accepting the worst of what he can do; the worst of what he has always wanted to do.

Then there is her and him and the door between them. Her mouth twitches and her scent wafts to him much more strongly and he is still and silent, waiting.

The scent changes and she lets her hand stroke the brass of the door knob before turning it and pulling towards her. He looks as she expected and his stance is like built like his bones are an impression of tensile steel.

He is wary and she enjoys it far more than she should allow herself to.

There is a sound starting, low in his throat. It isn't one of want, but challenge. A threat, because she no longer smells kindred, now there is something disturbing about her, profoundly so. There's something he can sense on her that lingers deep and has something violently wrong with it. She is suddenly another alpha of a different kind standing there and he can't have her now, not like that.

He pads backwards from her, he doesn't fear her but he doesn't like the way of her now. It enrages him because he wants what she can be, not what she normally is.

"No."

It is a command even though he knows she'll only respond the way he wants if she wants to, it's as close as he'll let himself come to begging or saying 'please' while he's like this.

She allows the Veela in her to subside and knows it'll stay subdued for the rest of the remaining night.

His teeth show when he smiles and his canines gleam in the light. His features are gaunter and sharper than usual and his hair is longer and more wild than when she shut the door.

He is lithe and muscled finely, long and lean and proud.

There is hunger in his face and brutality in the way his fingers clench and relax.

He's cock is hard and weeping already, reddened like an angry thing and bobbing as he comes closer and takes in where they both stand and stops when he's gone as far as the ruins allow him to go.

His head bends towards her and his hair falls over his face and his eyes are lidded in half, but they roam lazily over the lines of her, she feels only the barest of urges to let her head move itself to mirror the position of his own but she doesn't let it rule her.

It is an urge stemming from what she is trying to keep smothered, the things he wants kept smothered because he doesn't want to fight like that, doesn't want to throw himself against a creature that he can't mount after he chases and pulls at it enough.

He wants her to hit him and scream and cry and try to run but he doesn't want any of it to actually work to keep him from her. Besides, he's fulsome and doesn't want something going after him just as hard and have to consider that it's actually going to get him.

And though she'd like that, one day, it's not what she wants tonight and he's been waiting for something he's never thought he'd be able to get or have her give.

So she stands stiff while he takes in the smell of her body and breath and doesn't let her own gums pull back from her teeth in a savage grin when he growls in satisfaction half-way through a sniff.

For the first time that she's been so close to him she let's fear curl around her bones, she lets the thrill of panic and apprehension pluck at her nerves and creep into her blood.

It isn't a performance, not now. She doesn't even have to be conscious of keeping the scent of wolf strong, or the dread of him that comes from her decision, it spirals down and around and back up her throat all on its own.

She is scared in a rawest sense of the word for the first time in her life, and now she isn't the one that makes people's eyes glaze over in a haze of craving or spew from innate alarm over the alien nature of her. It makes her teeth bite the start of her tongue and failingly try to suppress a shiver that shakes her shoulders and makes her turn her head when his eyes trail over her face.

There is a horrible anxiousness in her diaphragm that has her abdomen pulling in and out with shakes as she breathes more and more unevenly.

And she savors this, revels in the delight of feeling what she doubts anyone else could give her.

"Bitch."

The word sends a thrum through her, resonating down her body from the way he says it and the way he stares at her. She knows exactly what he means by it.

Reaching into her pocket she fumbles with the slim gold case, pulling out a fag she gives him an expectant look that she hopes will make her request clear.

Teddy quirks his head to the side and eyes the fag. She looks at the end table by the couch and he understands. Loping to it and running his fingers gingerly across the box of matches and throws it at her, it skitters deep into the room and she has to go after it.

Victoire strikes a match against the rough strip outside the box and inhales while Teddy stands somewhere out of sight in the flat's living room.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor she watches and smokes. Her nerves are raw. Her fingers twitch on the filter. She bites down on the soft bit of her fag and rises, going to the door.

As she reaches the threshold a hand shoots out and there is his rough laughter as she startles and staggers back. His hair falls into view as he tips his head and then half of his face painted with a gleeful beaming grin. It's a look she's seen before but now it is not meant the same way as before.

His eyes widen as his grin does while he turns fully to plant a hand on either side of the door. Victoire knows that he wants nothing more than to lean in.

Her toes almost touch the threshold. She exhales smoke softly, letting it curl its way from over her tongue and across her teeth.

Teddy opens his mouth and sucks it in, breathes it deep and pushes it out his nostrils lazily.

"I won't always be a bitch, Teddy," she takes a drag.

"Tonight you are."

"Tonight I am," she confirms.

A look passes over his face and he breathes in the scents of smoke and her.

"Mine."

"Not yet."

He snarls at her and moves away from the door and towards the window. She watches his back as he stares out and the waves of movement in it as his muscles bunch and ripple.

Her womb shivers.

He sniffs and turns with his fingers running over his dripping cock, slowly and then with fast flourish. It's as if he's presenting himself to her and she waits for him to speak, knowing that he will because it has never been a question of 'if,' only 'when.'

"Come out."

She steps over the threshold and he stalks towards her.

"Take off your clothes."

She shakes her head and levels a look on him that is expected. He shrugs.

"I'm going to hurt you."

But she knows this and he is closer then and his body is taut and ready to grab at her. She is dropping her cigarette and hurtling over furniture before the smile that doesn't reach his eyes starts. He's been waiting for this for a very long time and they've got hours before the sun starts to crest over the skyline.

She's made it over the table but she doesn't clear the couch before fingers are wrapping tight like shackling over her ankle. Her leg is pulled tight and straight, the other with knee heaved into the wood frame under the sofa's cushioning. It stings and jolts pain up into her thigh.

Her glasses have skid off somewhere and her hair is falling against the floor.

She twists and feels the muscles between her ribs burn and the ones of her torso stretch as she rams the calf of her free leg against his skull.

Her spine pops and crackles in the new extension of her body, slanted right as she swings, knee with couch top clenched behind it for purchase and his hand still gripping the opposite ankle.

The rough wood scraps against her temple and he is yanking on her leg, evening out her knees. Her fingers can just barely press fixedly to the floor under her; she can't hold herself for long before her elbows start to shake.

Then there is pressure on her sex that she feels all the way through her denims and the sound of an inhale as his nose nuzzles her firmly. She watches him crest up over the couch from between her knees and then her thighs and then he is rubbing his chin against the metal button over her zip.

His hands are clenched into the cushioning and he nudges up the bottom of her shirt with a cheek, his hair draping along her skin in a way that makes it harder to hold herself up. He extends himself over her and his feet brace the spots next to her knees as his palms slam down on the wood behind her head on either side.

She stares at the tawny skin of his chest for just a moment before her teeth are deepening themselves into it, his hands yank her up to his face and his feet make the gentlest of sounds as he lets them down off the couch, her teeth rend at the skin the tiniest of bits because she doesn't let go and his snarl is inhuman.

The brush of his hair against her face has the feel of a blind person's touch, eyelash precise and soft. She yanks and his head rears back as she kicks and claws out from under him over the floor. A splinter catches in the side of her wrist, next to her thumb and it smarts throbbingly.

Victoire hears him, close but not close enough and she skirts around an end table, her hip sending it careening to the floor with a clattering crash as it bounces off the rug and onto the wood. He has already leapt the couch and is standing not a meter from her.

Her boot sends the coffee table into his knees, he stiffens for the barest of moments and she knows it barely hurt him. She eyes the smear of blood layered over the blossoming bruise patterned by the crenulations of her teeth, he is watching her take it in.

His steps and his feet pad along the top of the table and she takes a step back to accommodate him as he steps down in front of her, he looks strangely pleased and she's sure she is smiling as her fist clenches and her knuckles slam against his cheekbone.

Teddy likes her fist much less than her teeth, there is a blow to her breast full-on that has her gurgling and clutching at it, it's worse than any of the times she's met bludger with tit.

He weaves and the blow to her thigh has her whole leg cramping as a hand smacks between her shoulders and sends her scurrying over the table. His fingers are clawed at her hips gripping the denim and dragging. She's smirks thinking there's no way he'll be able to pull her back towards him, she's still smirking until there are his fingers on her bare arse trailing down the backs of her thighs and then her pants are caught along with her knickers at the tops of her boots.

Her hips catch on the edge of the table as her knees hit first, his grip tight around the dragon hide of her boots, she can feel his fingers against her bones, it hurts but not so much that she isn't prepared for it. Her nails chip themselves as she hauls her weight away and up, her chins cracks off the floor as the table slides from her grasp as it knocks her above the eyes when his weight is suddenly there, pressing the breath from her chest.

He is cock is a hot brand against the skin of her back as his nails scratch over her scalp and feels his breath on her face.

"That was fun. Going to fuck you now."

The hand in her hair moves to her shoulder and pulls on the fabric while the other starts at the hem-line. Her hair catches in it and her breast hurts as the underwire of her brassier digs into the tender spot where he'd hit her. He throws them both somewhere without aim.

He is warm and damp over her, heady and the weight of him is suffocating. She throbs and keens at the feel of it and of him.

She feels hot and slick all over, but mostly between her thighs.

His tongue drags itself along her spine through the sweat pooling between the dimples above her arse and between her shoulders and at the base of her neck.

There are teeth on her shoulder and the press of his tongue as an arm bands itself like steel around her hips and pulls her up and a hand yanking on a thigh that she was never going to press tight against the other, but he does it anyway.

The hand on her thigh has traveled and curls at the base of her neck pressing, gentle but firm, the drag of his cock across her swollen cunt has her arse raising and her hips jumping.

His growl is pleased and throaty.

She is expecting no gentleness, there is none received as he ruts her.

Her hips ache where his arm holds her tightly to him, his breath is ragged and punctuated by primal angry sounds pulled from his chest, her knees are raw and her calves sweat mercilessly encased in denim, his thrusting is brutal and despite the way her sex is plump and dripping, ready and wanting, she feels raw.

She is crying because it hurts, she'd known he'd have her crying. But again it is not unexpected, so she lets her nails dig into the arm pulling at her hips and her hand pound at the floor clenched tightly. Suddenly she is bucking and snarling and he is right there, pressing in as she presses back.

It is terrible and wonderful and there is anger and fear and hate and wonder there between their skin as he tears into her tearing back at him.

The hot, wet pulse of him is filling her as he shallows his thrusts and her body pulls and tugs on that turgid, angry part of him in her.

His weight is heavy on her sore body and the proof of his satisfaction paired with his softening cock is moist heat on the soft skin of her inner thigh. The tug on her hair is gentle and she rolls over under his body. Her eyes are red and her lips bitten raw and bleeding at the fullest parts.

His expression is wanting of something and she gives it a sweaty palm, swift but nothing more behind it that to make it a blunt tap. The sound is loud though and makes him widen his eyes softly and beam at her like a roguish child.

Victoire rolls her eyes and gives him a wet cough and a tiny smile. Her hand presses on his sweaty chest to tell him to move.

Teddy looks petulant and continues to remain stoic and unmoving over her, sweat drips off the end of her hair and makes her have to squint and purse her lips, he chuckles and shakes his hair over her.

His fingers dance over her the bruise on her breast and she winces and gives the smallest of hisses, he licks at the bruise and lets his teeth drag gentle and warm over the black and blue of it.

And then that sweaty, long hair of his is drifting over her chest, then under it as he gives her hips the same measured, precise and possessive licks and nips.

He scents it then, blood and his head snaps so quick that it makes her chest rumble with a laugh that would hurt her throat too much to let sound.

Fingers are gentle on her thighs as he pulls them apart and stares at the blood smearing them, sniffing and then staring again.

The pull hurts as his hands tense and she punches him in the head to tell him to not push further. He understands and looks up, eyes glazed with heat and hunger and she shakes her head because of the way his hips are moving against the floor.

"Again _later_."

He is still watching her as he rubs his stubble over her hip, it is a gesture of affection and she is at once stirred by it and insulted that he thinks she'd ever chose someone over him.

His wet fingers reach up to pull the frown on her face up leaving a bloody finger smudge behind, but then it doesn't matter because his hair is sticking to her skin as his tongue probes at her soreness.

At the end of a gasp she has her teeth pressing and grinding with his thumb between them. He lets his hand stay as his tongue laves at her with long slow licks at her swell of her sex, it is gentle and cautious and he listens to the sounds he pulls from her with fascination.

Teeth drag gently over her clit and she cants up toward his mouth, his tongue is hot inside her, the sharpness of his jaw and stubble makes her thighs shiver and the way his nose rubs against her has her circling her hips. She nudges him, banging her boots against the floor in frustration because even though what he's doing feels bloody fantastic she knows it's not enough.

Teddy stops and snaps but pulls them off and then her denims and finally her socks, he goes back and pointedly denies her what his past ministrations gave, favoring instead to lick at her thighs. Victoire thrums her heels down across his back and he nips at her.

Grabbing his hand she brings it down between her legs and the soreness feels a perfect mix of ache and loveliness. He tears his head up to watch, curious and confused.

It's the pressure that she raises her hips to as he grinds his hand down in no specific way and she arches the way she needs to in order to have her thighs shaking in strain and_ bonheur_.

He is laving his tongue across impression of his mouth on the inside of her thigh as she arches one delicate foot and wraps the other around his arm, the heel lightly pressed to his hip as she throbs under a hand he's let her have to do what she will with.

It isn't long before she is sated and boneless, slumped and spread out on the floor as he looks up expectantly.

"_Les broute clébard_," she huffs.

Teddy scowls and in a moment his face is over hers and then rough lips on hers, she disengages him with fingers pressed under his chin.

"Let me rest, silly boy. _Uhzerwise_ you'll tear me apart."

His grin is wolfish and his eyes are dark with amusement, licking at the smear of blood he'd left on her face.

"Did already."

But he rolls off and lays his head on her sweaty stomach, tongue probing at her navel until she wearily sleeps for what she is sure is no more than an hour. He is already in her waiting, thrusting shallow and soft until she is rocked into awareness.

Once she is awake he is deeper and there is nothing else between them that is insincere or false, at least until the sun rises.

* * *

><p>AN: Please check out kingcrossstation over at proboards, they are an active HP forum that is growing daily with new members, and resources for active HP writers and artists, they are also looking for moderators.


	8. Part 8

"_A girl is a person who screams at the mouse and smiles at the wolf"_

_The Second Day of the Full Moon_

He wishes that there is someone he can speak to, someone to second his opinion of himself. But there isn't because there aren't many and of those he could there is Bill, and Charlie, and Harry and the thoughts of all three make him sob and gulp for air as he chokes on what he is sure is vomit lodged in his throat.

It is worse that he can remember, not all of last night but a blur of most of it. The scent of her and how she'd hit him and bit him and how he'd hit her and bit her and then the way he mounted her on the floor and he can barely stare at the spot but his eyes always trail around it, taking in the overturned furniture and the broken things littered around.

The smell of her lingers and he can still feel her clenching around him and the heat of her, the sound of gasping she made with each thrust, the sight of blood on her skin. He coughs again and again and suddenly it bubbles from him, spew that is mostly froth because he hasn't eaten in what seems forever and now doesn't see the point in it.

He wants to obliviate himself and everything is so much worse since it was _the_ first time, doubtful she'd imagined it fucked like an animal on his living room floor crying like that.

The window looks like salvation but he'd survive the fall and he can't for the life of him find his wand, mostly he thinks she's hidden it because she wouldn't just take it, she always been good at hiding things and he's searched everywhere for it.

And there's the note that's written in the tiny sprawl of hers that makes him want to rip his eyes out.

_Teddy,_

_I am not sorry. _

_-Victoire_

She's not sorry. And really she should be and he wants to thump himself over the head for even thinking that because then it seems like he's saying she deserved him on her like that, and he can't think properly with her taking up so much space in his head.

He is so scared and worried and sickened by the thought that she will show up again that he opens the kitchen cabinet and fumbles with the brown parcel that Charlie had given him years ago. It sits in his lap as the day slips by without him noticing, and then when the sky is red he opens it and eats every last leaf inside the tin.

He is painfully hard when she arrives through the door and through the wards. He is also painfully uncoordinated and mush-brained.

Her mouth twists into an angry scowl, she is not pleased with him or the fact that he has consumed just short of a kilogram's worth of monkshood and thrown it up all over himself, the effect of it on him is lessened to a nonlethal but mostly paralyzing facet and all he can think is 'there's a pity.'

"You are twelve kinds of fool, Teddy Lupin."

And she gets a large pot that's he's never used from underneath the stove and fills it with a flick of her wand and has a wash rag slapping into her palm in the same breath.

Her hands are gentle and her hair is pinned back tightly. Her uniform is prim and starched and she's wearing a glamour over the marks on her neck and wrists**,**_** V. Weasley J.M.W.**_it pinned to her breast on a tiny rectangular plaque, golden letters set in pearl.

Teddy wonders if she's going to smother him at some point with a decorative couch pillow, he hopes so.

But she doesn't.

"I suppose you are more…coherent than the last time so I can say_ thez_ now: I am sorry if you are angry but not for _everyzeeng _else. I hate you greatly sometimes for certain things, mostly it is the things you say, not what you do. I expect you will not talk to me for awhile, that _es _fine, come to me when you are ready."

He nuzzles at her lap because she smells like him between her legs, he expects she will for awhile.

There are fingertips on his chest and he watches her look down at the unrelieved issue that has plagued him for the entire night.

Victoire makes a tsking sound and licks her palm and is suddenly stroking him, thumb gathering moisture from the red tip of him and dragging it down his cock with her fingers, she hums and he twitches into the coolness of her palm, unable to arch or twist.

His teeth are nipping at her thigh through her uniform; in frustration because she is plucking his arousal like a string and it makes him tremble and his eyes prick hotly because he _hates_ her. She _knows_ he's been hard all day and most of the night and she has to drag it out, he idly wonders if she's trying to get him to beg.

But then, he's already begging wordlessly with a chorus of twitching and jumping muscles and barely there gasps and rubbing teeth against her thighs.

"You know Teddy you have always hurt me by thinking me delicate, I am not. You have wanted me for a long time and I saw it even though you would not say it; that hurts more. The reason you will not take anything from me is because you think I don't know what it means to offer it; that hurts worst. You are selfish but so am I, and I was not patient. Now, I will be patient and wait for you to come to me."

Teddy growls as he spills into her hand, over her fingers. She drags her wet hand over his skin fondly as he softens and brings it to her mouth. Her tongue is dainty and precise as she holds his eyes while carrying out her task.

There is a smile at his expression and she gentle take his head from her lap, cleans up the water and remains of sour vomit from the floor around him.

He finds the strength to yank on her calf hard enough to startle her and make her let out a laugh and toe his hand away.

As she clicks her way to the door in her tiny stylish heels she inclines her head with a hand on her hip, pinning him with the barest of whimsical glances, the way a collector might look at the butterfly they're about to pin and put until glass.

She looks sad for a small moment then; finally she clicks out the door with the wards rising behind her.


	9. Part 9

**Title**: Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.

**Author**: grayglube

**Rating**: M/NC-17

**Spoilers**: None, NextGen

**Prompt:** #178: _Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others._ _-Eric Hoffer._

**Summary**: Between the breakfasts of cigarettes and coffee and the nights feeling homesick for a place they've never seen, between the red marks on lunar calendars and hankerings for red meat, there were stories and ceremonies, apologies and accidents, waning and waxing, alpha and omega.

**A/N**: Sorry for the immense wait in uploading this.

* * *

><p>"<em>Live with wolves, and you learn to howl"<em>

_3 Days after Full Moon_

She goes because she is quite ready for a confrontation, and even if none arises it has always been easier to begin on her own terms.

And because she works far too much for her mother's liking and shows up too little for her father's, because Dominique shows up at her flat if she doesn't show up at home enough, because Louis still cries when he thinks she's ignoring him, because she isn't around enough as it is and hasn't missed a dinner in her life.

She seats herself on the island and watches her set the table with blue crystal and white ivory; let no one call her mother anything less than an inspired place setter. It makes Victoire smile the tiniest of bits when her mother thrusts a no less elaborate ashtray at her and leave her to smoke while she returns to cooking.

Her siblings lounge around out of site on the beach as if there is nothing to do but laze about just because Dominique is free of Hogwarts for a few more days and Louis is still too young to have anywhere else to be.

For awhile it is just the two of them in the house that seems so much smaller outside than in, and it is nice because neither mentions the others choice of accessories or the gleam of glamour over skin. Her mother understands and at first looks surprised after noticing but then there is a smile that despite being aged is still as vibrant as she has always seen it.

Victoire feels the cool skin of her mother's hand run along her cheek while she takes a drag and then it is gone.

Fleur washes the dishes dirtied in cooking and watches her other children fuss in the dunes and toss sand in each other's faces.

"Your papa _weel_ not be _'appy_"

Victoire turns to look out the window and watch the sea swell.

"Who is there besides Teddy to make me happy?"

Fleur nods and rinses, Victoire watches and dries.

"Are you happy, now?" There is an inquisitive look coloring her mother's features curious.

"I am lonely," Victoire admits blowing out smoke without any real force, eyes facing the beach but no longer really watching the waves, she stares at her reflection in the glass.

Fleur props her hip into the wood of the counter and steals a drag of her fag, blowing it out quickly through her nose. Victoire hardly notices until she's handing it back.

"I know," is all her mother says and she walks to the table and straightens a plate that is already perfectly aligned with the silverware.

When she turns she looks sad but it is time for dinner so she shakes her head and casts the look away while opening the window over the sink and sending out a stream of lavender spell-work that when is ignored for a moment more than is respectful tosses Dominique off the dune and into the swell of a wave.

Louis trips his way inside and dusts off the sand with a shake and sits at the table beaming at Victoire as she vanishes away her fag because it is magic and Louis loves the spectacle of it despite being flimsy with it himself, he stares at her for a few moments and smiles before turning away.

Dominique stands outside the screen door shivering wetly as Fleur levels her with a serious look that has her youngest daughter staring at her feet.

"Sorry, maman"

Fleur flicks her wand and she is suddenly dry and allowed to come inside and sit down.

They do not wait for their father before they start eating, he is almost always late but he is always there and so it is not unusual.

Her father arrives shortly after the start of the meal, sputtering things under his breath about gold counts and vault numbers. When he enters the dining room he draws up short so noticeably it is not just Victoire who looks up but also Fleur.

Something passes that Dominique pretends not to notice because she is must more inclined to sit and watch whatever she assumes is happening play out and Louis is still blissfully youthful that the only thing he really needs to focus about is how best to drown his braised poultry with sauce infused with a generous portion of wizarding spirits.

"Hello, _Weelim_."

Her father's smile is false and strained but he wears it as best he can and tries to at least sniff the air furtively enough so no one but she and her mother notice.

"Sorry I'm late, love," with a kiss that has Louis in giggles and Dominique sighing dramatically he sits and there is silence, taut and weighty but silence all the same.

It lasts until Louis laughs.

Her mother lets her fork lie down gently atop her napkin and asks what is so amusing. With flourish he waves his knife in a manner that has Dominique leaning back so far in her chair it almost topples down, she scowls at their brother and maintains her staunched posture.

"That's not Victoire."

Dominique tries to suppress a grin and her father looks as if he has stopped breathing mid-chew and her mother looks singularly amused and fascinated.

"Oh? _Et certeenly_ looks like Victoire."

"_But_…it smells like Uncle Teddy."

Victoire watches her father finally swallow and blanch so quickly that she is worried he might fall out of his chair and takes in her mother's gentle smile crack the tiniest of bits, and she hears the gag Dominique makes as she chokes on whatever bite of food had been in her mouth and cough while her chortling echoes in the silence of the dining room.

Her mother's glare could chill ice and Dominique quiets.

"Louis, Dominique, go to your rooms," her father has a grip on the edge of the table that makes it seem as if he's libel to lift it and throw it at any moment.

Her little sister skitters out with Louis in tow scrambling to carry his plate with him, excited at the prospect of being able to eat in his room.

"I think _et's_ a joke, but papa doesn't _theenk_ it's very funny," are the parting words as they scurry out and trudge up the stairs.

Her father's grip has eased on the table but his face is tight, not angry, but there is concern and irritation written in the scant lining of his forehead.

"I wouldn't press the issue but you are wearing a glamour Victoire, and it's a day after the full moon," he rattles out with great effort what seems like minutes later.

"I am aware of what is happening in the sky lately, papa," she's glib but not so much that she's really trying to be a brat, but enough to get her unsaid point across.

"_Weelim_…," her mother starts.

Her father does not quite take it for the warning it is, rather he thinks it a plee for a clueing in.

"Fleur, Victoire and Te…-"

"I know."

"Oh."

Her father has nothing but the surprised sound to offer.

"_Et_ _iz_ none of our _beeziness_, _Weelim_," and her mother takes a sip of her wine.

"She's wearing a glamour," he states.

"So is maman."

Her father pales again and her mother levels her a look that tells her to be nice and not press. Victoire sends one back that says she won't unless her father presses first.

"That is different."

"It isn't, not really." Victoire states simply.

"Your mother and I are married."

"That makes things more right than what I have done?"

"It does."

"Because it is a planned event?"

Her father turns angry red at the crude suggestion and her mother rolls her eyes.

"…"

"Because I'm not blind, papa, I do know exactly what the moon does without having to look out a window or walk outside."

"I never said you didn't."

"I know, but I'm not a child or a fool."

"I never said you were."

"Then you will leave Teddy alone."

Her father scowls and nods.

Her mother reaches for his hand and squeezes gently as if to let him know he is doing what is right and smart.

"I'm not happy about this."

"I know but you're not the one who has to sit here with everyone knowing business that is not theirs."

He sighs and rubs at his eyes.

"I'm not happy you wore a glamour to dinner, either."

"I did not want to upset you."

"Should I be?"

"No, but you are anyway, and you wouldn't ask maman to take off her glamour at the table would you?"

He does not answer because her father knows when he's being unreasonable and is not going to win, his blood is tamer than Teddy's and that alone is probably the reason he hasn't flooed over to rip out his throat for having his scent all over his daughter enough to have an eleven year old notice it.

It isn't a secret what has happened but it is acknowledged that there is nothing to be done about it unless Victoire says so and she doesn't say so, so that ends it because her father respects her judgments, and her mother understands them.

But that does not mean that her father agrees or likes them, or that her mother will not worry and cry over them. It is for all this that Victoire is glad that she has to only have this conversation once because once is still too many a time.

It is Fleur who meets her eyes first and with that same smile that has never dulled that she is always easy to give she gives a tap to the oval stone hanging between her breasts and lets her glamour dissolve with a grin taking the place of her smile.

Her father stares and unable to say anything he loses all the fire he has held in his eyes since Louis and Dominique left the table, because there's the shape of his hand around his wife's neck and the imprints of his teeth on her throat and the reddened line of a scratch across her cheek.

Everything else is hidden under gauzy, floating fabrics and the hold her mother has on her father's hand to let him know that everything is all right.

"I do not like to be so rude Victoire. I am sorry, but I am your _maman _and I am _worreed_ too. Fair is fair."

Victoire slips off her ring and sets it on the table and is glad neither of them let out a breath over the state of her. She meets their gazes and watches her father's body clench even though he wills himself to relax and fails because he is all too understandably angry and hurt because she has been hurt and she is his child, watches her mother's eyes narrows and fill with something she doesn't recognize but does not like because it looks too much like heartache.

"You shouldn't have to forgive someone for this Victoire," she has never seen her father with a glaze over his eyes in her life and she feels something gnaw her insides because seeing a proud man so broken breaks everything around him just as thoroughly.

"Teddy has done nothing that needs forgiving."

He scoffs and is no longer looking at the bruises painted onto her skin like birthmarks. Fleur yanks on his ponytail and gives him a look of reprimand.

"He's more dangerous than I am! Merlin, Victoire!" It sounds less like anger and more like a plea to himself, but for what she can only guess, most likely a time turner or the resolve to be able to really truly hurt someone.

"I'm hardly any less dangerous, more than _maman_ is to you. Just because no one says _et _doesn't mean _et's_ not noticed, doesn't mean that I don't know _et_. _Theengs_ would not have happened if I had not chosen them for myself," Victoire says simply as she puts her ring back on and her mother touches a hand to her necklace.

For a moment everyone just breathes. Victoire allows them both this before she rises and they watch her turn to leave the dinner that she'd always expected having to leave.

"I am sorry to ruin dinner, I wouldn't have come if I'd known you wouldn't worry, which you do, so I came now."

Her father nods and does not meet her eyes, her mother looks proud in a worried way and waves her out which is_ her_ equivalent of telling her daughter not to worry so much about things.

She goes to the beach and waits because that is all she can do until dinner is finished and one of them comes out to say something that they haven't realized they've wanted to say yet. She sits in the sand and watches the sky turn red and orange.

It is her father that stands in the sand behind her watching the sunset for as long as it will last. He sits in the sand with her and they talk.

They talk about how she has always been the one to want to be alone and how now it has become loneliness because she has doesn't have who she wants with her, and how she is no one's but her own.

They talk about how her father would not have chosen Teddy for her but that he'd always expected it but that that doesn't change that he is angry, with him and with her.

She tells him that things are different for herself and Teddy and him and Fleur because they are not ruled by what other people are ruled by, that there is something else that is in all of them that makes them into people who have different ways in which they need to live, different ways in which they need people.

He tells her that he knows and that he worries. That they all worry because they don't know if she's just too proud to ever ask for anything or someone else's help or if she just doesn't need anyone, or them anymore.

She tells him she doesn't know.

He asks her if Teddy is what she wants.

She says 'yes,' and 'always.'

He is quiet and finally, softly, says, 'okay.'

Then he asks when the wedding will be and she rolls her eyes answering that if he leaves her mother alone long enough it will be planned and paid for by the end of the night and that he should go and keep her occupied so they don't have to sell one of their other children in order to survive.

Her father gives her a laugh that is shammed and Victoire offers him a smile that is strained.


	10. Part 10

**Title**: Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.

**Author**: grayglube

**Beta**: Maria

**Rating**: M/NC-17

**Spoilers**: None, NextGen

**Prompt:** #178: _Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others._ _-Eric Hoffer._

**Summary**: Between the breakfasts of cigarettes and coffee and the nights feeling homesick for a place they've never seen, between the red marks on lunar calendars and hankerings for red meat, there were stories and ceremonies, apologies and accidents, waning and waxing, alpha and omega.

* * *

><p>"<em>But the sea-fowl has gone to her nest, the beast laid down in his lair"<em>

_7 Days after Full Moon_

She is steamed as pink as the thick rectangle of soap on the bath tray set above her shins, perched delicately on the edges of the tub. The rungs hit her knees with every movement she makes to sink down deeper into the water. It is only mildly irritating compared to who has just turned up in her fireplace.

Victoire can't see the living room but she knows it is Dominique who is all but stomping her way to the bathroom, she knows because she's the only one who stomps. And suddenly her little sister is there swinging heavily into the door frame with little finesse and curious eyes that do not care about the bruises her sister is wearing.

"Louis _'as_ absolutely no manners."

"Not unlike yourself _naine nana_," Victoire points out with the wash cloth in her grasp poised in her sister's direction.

Dominique shrugs and tilts her head jauntily to the side bouncing her curls and sighing with crossed arms.

"The floo was open, for once. But now I don't think you were expecting me, oh!" She stops as a thought strikes her hard between the eyes, crinkling her forehead that same way it does their mother's.

"He's not on his way is he?" She asks in a tone just above a whisper, looking around the hall behind her as if he will suddenly appear out of the wall.

Victoire rolls her eyes and points to the toilet in a gesture that says the other girl is free to sit on its downturned lid instead of stand in the doorway.

"Not that I know of."

"But just in case?"

"Yes."

Her sister bangs her boot heels against the tiles of the bathroom floor and the porcelain behind her feet and looks at the bruise across Victoire's half-hidden chest through her fringe.

Victoire notices because she is not expecting her little sister not to look.

"Is he angry with you?"

"I expect so," she wetly reaches for her pack of fags and lights one with a snap of her fingers. Dominique snickers at the bit of wandless magic that is really little more than a parlor trick, but Victoire knows that she will go home and work at it now in her spare time to be able to do it herself.

"So why did you do it?"

"Because he wouldn't have asked me to."

"I don't think he's the type to like a pity shag Victoire," Dominique's eyes are dark and mean when she speaks for a reason Victoire can't guess at.

"Eventually we had to stop dancing around each other."

Her sister leans back and speaks an accio that has the pack of fags flying into her hand, she turns the small box over in her hands as if she has no idea what is inside.

"You mean you got tired of having to wait for him to pull his head out of his arse," she takes out a fag and rises to put the box back onto the bath tray.

She lights the fag with her wand and coughs on the first inhale.

Victoire doesn't laugh and Dominique tries to blow out a ring of smoke that comes out instead as a cloud that makes her eyes tear and her cough get louder.

"That's what _maman _thinks, so you know. But really that's dumb. You just want to make _'eem_ feel bad enough to let you even the score and you didn't want to feel as bad as he does now if you started first. So really you're just a twat, Victoire."

Dominique knows that she is right but she doesn't look as if it's something she wants to be right about, mostly because she knows like everything else she's figured out about a multitude of things other people don't ever notice that it really is something she knows nothing about.

Victoire says nothing because she knows there is more; there is always more with Dominique.

"But you're always mean, that's just you're way. You let Teddy hurt you because you want it to be fair when you hurt him, so you're tender about it and gracious or whatever," and she snorts and goes on.

"_I_ think you should _'ave_ just gone for it. I mean why not, right? I don't get you at all sometimes sis. Not. One. Bit. And I think you should have told him at least, because you're not even, you know. You know all about what he is and he doesn't know one thing about what_ you _are." She eyes Victoire waiting for a response she's not going to get.

"You want him to figure it out, but he's not going to because he's a boy and that's enough for an explanation."

Dominique throws the fag she hasn't even been trying to smoke the right way into the toilet and flushes.

"But that's just what I think and so I'm going to go now because _et's _your business, and really it's fecking ridiculous that _I _have to be the one to tell you what to do sometimes, because no one ever _theenks_ of telling _you_ anything because they think you know it all. Sometimes you are really dim. Not now, but sometimes. So just think about it, okay, sis?"

Victoire takes a drag and feels glad for some reason that Dominique is her sister.

"I will. Now leave so I can take my bath in peace without this _theeng_ digging into my knees and worrying if you see things you shouldn't see."

With a scowl and a pout Dominique leans on the doorframe again and makes a comment on how small her sister's tits are and how she has no idea why Teddy would rut with someone who has the chest of a twelve year old girl and that really it isn't like she hasn't seen tits before. The wash cloth hits her in the face before she has the chance to apparate away with a comment that she's one to talk following after it.

When she is gone Victoire presses at the bruise on her breast and winces before sighing, it sends warmth between her thighs and she presses them lightly together to have the feeling linger. They are sore but the dullness of the ache is pleasant and makes her sex throb.

The tub edge presses into the bruise at the ridge of her shoulder and she presses back against the warmed surface harder, moving up and down against the lip of tub so it hurts sharply and smarts even more, even deeper down to her bones.

She lets her fingers trail up and back down the sides of her cunt not pressing but stroking lightly enough to tease and thrill her as her elbow sinks into the softness of her inner thigh as her hand moves slowly, the bone sinking against the skin and with a circling press every so often hitting the middle of the bruise that paints her paleness.

She'd known after she'd left Teddy's flat that the hurt would only get worse that it would stay and linger for almost as long as his scent on her, and the bluntness of the hurt is nice, blurry and fuzzy but still stinging if she keeps at the marks long enough.

Victoire knows that rubbing at them won't make them last any longer but it is something she wishes would. She rolls the pad of a finger over the pearl of a nub below her mons and her breath is a knob in her throat, a solid thing there catching tightly.

And for a while sleepily she strokes herself not needing anything more than that, until suddenly she is slipping a finger inside where she feels plush and wetter than the bath water, the heel of her hand rolling across where her finger had been and her hips pushing up as her toes press against the other side of the tub and sending her bruised shoulders against the side as she stretches her body and raises her pelvis.

Her chest doesn't move with breath and that coupled with the spiraling heat make her agreeably dizzy and dazed until she is gulping and thrusting in le petit mort.

Sagging into the water she feels wicked enough to bring her knees to her chest and kick the metal tray off the tub.

It doesn't hurt as much as she wants it to, she pouts and let her leg splash back into the water and wave a good amount of it out of the tub. She closes her eyes and thinks of silly things, like how tightly cramped the tub would be if another person squeezed into it at the other end or how lovely it might be to ride someone with wet tiles banging against her knees and cool water splashes up at her shins or even how nice it would be to fall asleep in the tub against someone nestled behind her instead of warm porcelain.

For a few moments she can even pretend that's exactly what's she's doing but the water is soon tepid and she shivers and has to spell it hot again.


	11. Part 11

**Title**: Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.

**Author**: grayglube

**Beta**: Maria

**Rating**: M/NC-17

**Spoilers**: None, NextGen

**Prompt:** #178: _Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others._ _-Eric Hoffer._

**Summary**: Between the breakfasts of cigarettes and coffee and the nights feeling homesick for a place they've never seen, between the red marks on lunar calendars and hankerings for red meat, there were stories and ceremonies, apologies and accidents, waning and waxing, alpha and omega.

**A/N**: Originally this was supposed to be my entry for the nextgendarkfest but I dropped out because there was no way I could finish it the way I wanted to finish it in the time I had to write it. It turned out better I think than I planned. Thanks go out to stormsandsins for the help with the French.

* * *

><p>"<em>And the owlet whoops to the wolf below"<em>

_4 Days until the New Moon_

The weather was damp and frigid and he'd known if he didn't show his face that it would have seemed odd to Uncle Harry if Victoire happened to not show too.

Odd enough to send people out to his flat.

People like Harry Potter that could as easily case a room as he could draw a breath, and know that the deep scratches left in the wood hadn't come from rearranging furniture but from it being thrown across the room or someone's nails digging in.

People like Charlie Weasley that would dig through his garbage and find an empty tin that now only held the tiniest of crumpled withered bits of monkshood stalk in it.

People like Bill Weasley that scented sex and pheromones and blood and sweat as if they were his own in the air, engrained in the wood, on skin.

Teddy kept his distance and came early enough to make his walk in the drizzly horrid weather seem like a distraction from hunger when told that dinner wasn't ready yet, as if he hadn't already known and planned for it.

And it wasn't that someone besides him was outside that surprised him, but who it was and how they perched themselves on a wet wooden bench as if their arse wouldn't be soaked through thoroughly by the time they got up did manage to stop him from trying to walk off the scent of _her_ from his skin.

She sat like some out of place doll, forgotten and forlorn, a toy left out in the rain to muster slowly and coldly.

Dominique was nothing like her sister, perpetually crass and brash, big eyes and small lips that puckered like an albino koi irritated that it was stuck in a pond so small, spring curled, and loose-limbed.

Where Victoire was tanned like someone who'd only ever had winter sun on her skin, Dominique was ivory like she'd only ever known starlight in summer. Where Victoire had hair like matte platinum, Dominique had glossed gold. Where Victoire tapered, Dominique straightened and the other way round. Victoire liked her walls, Dominique preferred her spaces.

So in the rain she sat out and stared at water spilling over the leaves of an already dead rhododendron bush in a frilled dress and jumper with a braided belt and her curls weighted by raindrops, her shoes water-logged and the tops of her feet muddy.

"Quit starin', ya fecking git," her smile was big enough for him to see half of it from where he stood. He turned his head but didn't walk away.

"Sorry. You just looked odd."

She stared out at him, she had wider eyes than her sister but they narrowed in a similar fashion. He turned in her direction.

"She's a right twat, so either you're fecking dumb or fecking weak."

He knew he should have been offended but he was devoid of anything to make emotion out of, he was too drained of the inherent will to hold onto any feeling or opinion.

Dominique huffed and blew out wetly, whipping her face forward to stare at the dead flower bush.

" Whydja even let her do it? Now she's gonna come and collect, you do know that right?" Her eyes moved but her chin stayed level and high. Teddy felt that he was without answers, a coupled emptiness associated with his emotional drabness.

"Yeah, figured you'd have no fecking clue what I meant. Just so you're not surprised, she ain't so nice, and she ain't 'walks softly' and all that tripe. You'll probably end up in Mungos after you go see her."

There was something malicious in the small girl. Dominique was jagged, Victoire was hard. Her chest heaved once, twice; the air was cold and harsh.

"Not 'cause she's angry but cause she gets real mean, times like these," she continued as if pointing out a well-known fact.

"It happens and that's why I think she doesn't mind if you get out what _you_ need to get…_out_ with her during the full moon. But she does it so you feel like you deserve what's coming, and what's comin' is her ripping your arms off most like," she shrugged and frowned in his direction, tipping her chin at an angle so he could see both her eyes squinted and tilted high to throw him into her line of sight.

"But I'll give you a tip: she wants you to fight, and she wants you to want to fight and get torn up. She wants to do for you what you'd do for her, or other way round," the eyes that had been watching him shifted and she let her chin drop and her curls fall around her face in a damp heap for a few moments, looking for words.

She propped an elbow on a knee and her jaw in the cupped palm and let her head roll sloppily at him, child-like and sullen.

"Give and take and all that. She doesn't have anyone but you to do that with."

And for a moment the younger girl sounded especially bitter. Jealous. He felt his forehead draw up and his eyes take on a confused squint.

"Why do you care what Victoire does to me?"

"I don't care, not a bit, but she's my sister and she deserves what she wants. And she's already chosen you as what she wants; she chose you a long time ago."

A door slammed. Teddy snapped his head towards the sound, Dominique let her head tilt back and her face stop the rain until he returned to the conversation.

"Everyone was thinking it and watching it happen, but they really didn't actually ever expect it to happen," she told him when he didn't look back quick enough.

"Everyone except you." It was as much of a question as anything else he might have said.

"Well, her and me may be as different as night and day but we're a pair and I know her like I know where my nose is even when I close my eyes."

"You don't like that she chose me."

"What?" She looked underwhelmed.

"You're jealous."

With an absolute aghast expression she stayed frozen in indignation for more than a moment, enough for Teddy to realize he had guessed wrong and deeply offended the young girl.

"Oh get over yourself. Yeah, I'm jealous but only 'cause she's already made her choice. You're it, Teddy. It's hard to be a kid and watch everything happen to everyone else and know that you still have to sit around and wait."

"Yeah? Who are you waiting for?" He asked knowing he was being snide and wanting her to know. He did not like being questioned by someone who he thought thought of themselves as being allowed to say things that she was saying.

She seemed to ponder the question very seriously.

"I'm waiting for…myself, really. I guess. I just…, sometimes I think it'd be lovely to go off by myself and just go solo out into the world and be completely alone, have real solitude." She swung her feet and let her head move as if tracking something with her eyes, she kept talking.

"It's hard to watch someone who's like that find someone who's their equal to have a kind of solitude _with_. The type that only two people who are perfectly right for each other can have."

"You think a lot."

"I always think, because I can't always do. Ya know? And Victoire I think plays at things and it gets me angry, because it's like she's faking at something that is supposed to be natural. And then I feel happy that she can't do something as well as me."

She gave herself a small private smile at the sentiment.

"But you're jealous."

Her curls swung arcs of water around her face when she turned her face to look at him.

"Bet your arse I am. I just want to get what Victoire has with you, with someone, one day. Some people say I'm too picky but really I'm not going to waste my time and settle for something I don't want when all I have to do to get it is be patient. I can wait, but sometimes when you find something you've wanted you don't have any use for it, you're too tired to really care enough anymore. It gets lonely. Sometimes."

Teddy felt the urge to start walking again, that the conversation had come to a close.

"I just think that you should know that you shouldn't feel so bad at doing whatever you did, or how you did it because my sister isn't stupid. I think you need to go have a chat with her and yell at her because she always thinks she has a right to pull this type of bullshit, and really everyone lets her. And I just think it isn't fair that no one really tells you any of this, no one to give you any insight."

Teddy placed his hands in the pockets of his jumper and tried not to smile dumbly at the idea of yelling at Victoire.

"Anything else?"

A grin took over the whole of her face, uncontrollable and appling her cheeks into round firm mounds.

"Yeah, don't walk in papa's direction with the wind at your back. He might decide to fecking murder you. Hard. Do you know what's for dinner?"

"Yeah. Lamb."

"Ehh. I _hate_ lamb. Guess I'm eating scabs and sage derby."

"That's disgusting."

"You rutting my sister is disgusting to the majority of the dinner table but that doesn't mean _you_ don't find it savory." Her teeth trailed over her bottom lip in a way that seemed obscene to him, not sexual just violent, disturbed.

Instead of letting an expression take over his face he turned and asked if she planned on sitting in the rain or coming inside to eat.

She hopped up and trotted off ahead of him, tiny and precise in her steps she twirled and walked slowly backwards swaying loosely in her distraction of trying to say something that she couldn't give words to.

He stopped to give her a chance to ask but she just opened her mouth, shook her head, and kept walking backwards until they were too far apart to talk to each other anyway, she stopped, looked over her shoulder, turned and looked around.

Teddy Lupin could honestly say he'd never at anytime expected to be thrown backwards by a well-approximated and aimed spell cast by a little girl.

Dominique Weasley laughed loud and brassy; she bobbed back at him and brandished her wand at his head.

"Ready?"

"…for what?" He growled out, angry and confused.

"Volatile Oil Bomb, oh don't make that face. Volatile as in evaporation not blow up. I wouldn't blow you up or set you on fire. I'm not mixed in the head. Dummy."

"What does it do?"

"Make's you not smell like you fucked my sister."

She grinned.

"What will it make me smell like?"

"Nothing. Gonna do it now."

She threw a globe at his chest, it cracked and splashed and dissipated in a fog that gelled first and then wavered out like heat. It stung, he hissed.

"Though you said it wouldn't hurt."

Already walking away she just rolled her eyes.

"I said I wouldn't set you on fire, or blow you up. I never said or will ever say that I won't deliberately _hurt _you, or try to. Get up you're playing in mud like a baby."

"You're a brat."

"I am. This I do not deny," she looked pleased and indignant at the same time with her answer, Teddy smiled at her and got up off the ground, fingers slipping in the mud gathering under his nails.

There was clanging and a distant voice calling everyone to dinner.

"Mama isn't here. Victoire isn't here. I guess that means I have to sit at the big table tonight."

"Lucky you."

"I don't like to eat at the table. Everyone else eats so slowly, after I finish the only thing to do is watch everyone eat. It's so bloody boring."

"You stranger than you're sister."

"Heh. Thanks. I hope Uncle George shows up I have loads of ace ideas to go over for the shop."

"You should show him that stuff you just used on me," he joked.

"I did, he says I have to come up with a less negatively connotated name for it."

"Did he actually say that?"

"You sound like Uncle Ronald. In so many words yes, that is exactly what he said, disregarding those exact words," she beamed at him and climbed the back steps of the burrow.


	12. Part 12

**Title**: Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.

**Author**: grayglube

**Rating**: M/NC-17

**Spoilers**: None, NextGen

**Prompt:** #178: _Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others._ _-Eric Hoffer._

**Summary**: Between the breakfasts of cigarettes and coffee and the nights feeling homesick for a place they've never seen, between the red marks on lunar calendars and hankerings for red meat, there were stories and ceremonies, apologies and accidents, waning and waxing, alpha and omega.

**A/N**: Originally this was supposed to be my entry for the nextgendarkfest but I dropped out because there was no way I could finish it the way I wanted to finish it in the time I had to write it. It turned out better I think than I planned. Thanks go out to stormsandsins for the help with the French.

Sorry for the two year wait.

* * *

><p><em>"No siren did ever so charm the ear of the listener as the listening ear has charmed the soul of the siren"<em>

_1__st__ Day of the New Moon_

He knew that she was aware of his presence at her door because quite suddenly after he'd knocked he realized that the footsteps across the floor above had stopped.

Teddy had realized that something was off but it was only in the absence of the thudding above his head that he'd even noticed it was there.

"Vic, I want to talk," he spoke through the door with his fist propped on the frame, eyes downcast.

"So come in."

He startled and raised his head but the underside of the stairs blocked his view of where she had spoken from, the door on the floor above shut with a click.

The door he stood in front of was locked and he wondered with a bite to the inside of his mouth if he was supposed to mount the stairs and try the other door. He turned and wrapped the end of the banister inside his palm, running the toe of his trainer through the layer of dust settled on the stairs to the third floor he wondered when someone had last climbed then.

Peering up at the last landing and the last door he felt chilled, made smaller by the height of the ceiling. He felt a distinct sense of unease, primitive fear, he had no idea what had brought it on but it only sharpened when the door to his back opened with no one standing in the threshold.

The unease did not ebb just for the fact that the lights inside her flat were on and he could hear the ticks her heels made on the wood floors, it only sunk deeper into him making him all too aware of the fact that there was something savage in Victoire.

He went in and tried to piece together her expression from the dark reflection in the window glass she stood in front of.

It puzzled him to notice that she was barefoot, the tendons delicate and pinched as she stood one foot flat and the other arched against her ankle.

Shutting the door he lets it hold him up.

"Did you want me to do those things to you?"

Her head tilts to the barest of angles and he sees then that she is smiling, small and cold.

"Yes."

Teddy sits in the worn leather wingback and clenches the arms, hating that she is so honest with him.

"Why?" He asks it bitterly and suddenly he feels malicious. She turns and he sees the gleam of magic encasing her, the spellwork is sound and all of the marks he made are hidden in the haze of it.

"You know why," her smile is vindictive.

"I don't."

"You _do_."

He does but he hasn't seen it and because he can't see it he can't believe it so he goes silent and slumps back into the cracked leather savoring the scent of it and the mingling of smoke and violets.

"…"

Her fingers click against the glass in a pattern of noise that reminds him of the way she walks.

"You think you're the only one who feels these things? The urges, the pulls, the temptations? I feel it. You've seen it. That's why."

"Don't justify it like that," he scoffs. Victoire turns and leans against the window, her body straight and her head turned, every line tight and perfect as if she's presenting herself to him as an object to impact the situation they are involved in that much deeper into his memory, his being.

"I'm sorry if you're offended that I did exactly what you wanted me to do," her tone is waspish, it makes his position in the chair much harder to keep, he wants to get up and draw her up to him tightly, unforgiving, relive the past.

"It wasn't me, the wolf isn't me!" He shouted as he stood from the chair. Delight lighted her features as he moved her eyes suddenly mirthful.

"It wants the same things you do, it at least asks for it."

"I didn't want _that_," he glared at her and realized he had moved closer to her, he stepped back and turned away putting her out of his sight for a brief moment.

"No. You didn't want it _like_ that. You wanted sweetness, not violence. You wanted that because you thought that was all I could ever take from you. I don't need you to be sweet. Not all the time."

"What I did is not alright!"

"Why not?"

"Because you're not like me!"

"When you meet a beast, show it your teeth. Don't recite poetry to one who is not a poet."

"I hate you, sometimes."

He turned back and found her staring at him curious and concerned.

"I hate you too, sometimes," she shrugged. Teddy gripped the back on the chair he had turned from and let his hair fall over his face and his shoulders sink and clench.

"Just tell me," he wagged his head back and forth, not believing that he was asking a question that he never wanted to think of her answering, thinking of answers he never wanted before. He heard her sigh, he did not look up.

"I'm different from the rest of my family. I feel things the way you feel them, just at a different time than you do. I wanted  
>you, like that. But I want you like this too. Because you are both of these things."<p>

"Why?" He looked up at her from underneath his eyelashes.

"Because I was being cruel. I'm cruel now. I want you to let me hurt you; I want you to enjoy it. I want to hunt something and fuck something that's like me, that can take it, that can understand it," her voice was hushed, a rasp mingled with the sound of her nail running over the windowsill.

"Are you hurting?"

"Yes, it hurts. It always hurts."

Looking at her he wondered why she had answered his question in that way. He knew she had not understood what he was asking, and he did not understand her answer.

"What does?"

Her eyes were narrow, wary. Turning towards the window fully he watched her turned her face up at the empty, darkening sky.

"Nights without the moon hurt," her body tightened and shivered under soft spring dress she wore. Teddy thought it was the most delicate he'd ever seen her.

"You're not wearing a glamour because of the marks I left, so why are you wearing one?"

"Because if you don't feel like staying there's no reason to show you," her voice was quiet, pained.

He took in the shape of her shoulders and the silhouette of her thighs and knees through the gauzy white of the dress, he wanted to know what it was that he had ignored.

"I was never leaving so show me."

Her fingers yanked off the ring she wore and dropped it to the floor. His throat constricted and his cock throbbed as she unbuttoned her dress to the hem and let it drop from her shoulders, simply and without flourish.

The savage thing inside of her was standing in front of him.

A thing with hair like starlight and spun glass, nails that had become talons; long and black and to his surprise painted, vainly so with gold designs that would have made him grin at any other time.

A thing with every bone sharpened and lengthened, eyes inky and teeth small and sharp.

A thing stuck formed too much like two different things to be either, skin mottled with the pull of something underneath, spears of fine streaks grouped tight together, the shape and stretch of feathers creasing her skin silver.

A thing that was sharpening and changing more deeply as slowly as the sky turned black and the stars streaked across the dark devoid of moonlight.

A thing whose scent made the clench of denim against his groin tight enough to wince from, whose nudity was natural and expected, arousing in an unexpected way that coupled with his sudden apprehension and fear.

A thing that was as likely to fuck him as kill him and more likely than one to do both, most likely to do both at the same time and make him want it to last as long as possible.

She looked at him, eyes inky and alien.

"What's upstairs?"

There was no answer, just the sound of her nails clicking on the floor as she made her way towards him and all too suddenly pounced, settling on his lap, roosting comfortably while making him growingly more uncomfortable.

"Wha…-"

Her mouth was on his, dragging his tongue around hers. Her lips sweet and taunting, strange and smooth. Her teeth bit down on his own chapped pair and savored the taste, sucking and nipping before trailing away and onto his fragile pulse.

The suction of her mouth pulling the artery to closer to the surface of his skin and he'd never felt closer to having his throat ripped out before, there was always the chance that she'd do it; rend him.

"Ugh, Victoire…-"

Her eyes scared him when they turned up and leveled his own. There was nothing in them, just blackness. Pools.

"Quiet."

Her voice was like wind rattling twigs, far away but coming closer, like it wasn't there at all, as if she'd never spoken.

Teddy didn't speak and Victoire grew pleased and preened against his cheek, the texture of her skin a soothing rasp. He felt deliciously weak and weightless. He felt like prey. He felt like she'd already caught him.

"Touch."

His let his fingers trace the tendons of her neck and shoulder, let his palms roam down and around her pert breasts, let his nails pinch puckered nipples tightly, let his knuckles buck up into the hot wetness between her thighs and roll over the yielding flesh of her cunt.

The mist over his mind made him much less able to care that this was not what he'd come to do, all he needed to do now was what she wanted him to do.

"Thrust."

Her hips arched into his, hard and rhythmic, he was keening and his hands grasped and dug furrows into her skin. She was biting at him, her sharp tiny teeth marking him, sending throbbing heat into his blood, pain searing and making mounds of the corded veins under his skin.

The crenellated punctures she left behind oozing weakly, the mix of blood turning black and venomous as it mixed with her saliva.

It burned. He found himself relishing the feel of it as his haze cleared and his hips and hands stilled.

"What did you do?"

Teddy wanted to throw her from him but she was suddenly much heavier than he'd allowed himself to notice, like an iron boned creature.

"I'm hurting you," she grinned wildly.

"Not even close," he smiled weakly. "Try harder."

She did. He wondered if he was enjoying her own brand of retribution as much as she was. His mind was cloudy and indistinct again when she rose off him smoothly, seductive and spoke to him.

"Follow."

There were stairs to the next floor deeper down the hall that they climbed.

She led him forward into the old owlery that had once been much more grand. There was a ladder that she drew herself up as if by the force of something pulling her. He followed and placed himself crouched at the top of it in a loft that was lighted from the outside by street lamps and stars through the large ceiling high window.

Her body glowed silver.

He waited for a command or a suggestion that he'd carry out in the same way, either way.

His mind was in an instant clear, sharp, wary of her as she stood amongst a bed of cushions, a nest of soft fabric and feathers.

"I get it now."

Those eyes, inky and indistinct in their blackness seemed to never move, it was only when they shined that he knew that they were taking things in.

They shined and he knew it was his body that she was taking in.

She didn't respond but he didn't let it bother him too deeply.

"Whatever you want, however you want. Victoire."

At the site of her teeth he rubbed the spot where she'd bitten deep, he stared at his fingers and realized that the spot had gone numb and the blood was seeping out a very far cry from red.

"Scar."

He rolled his eyes and scowled and followed the way her sharp nails ran along her neck along a mark that he knew he'd be the one to make.

He laughed weakly.

"We'll match," he laughed harder after he said it.

She was fast and she was in front of him staring up, eyes gleaming as they rolled and rattled. Her scent was overpowering, pungent and potent.

"Fight."

She was faster than his first blow, but not his second. The shove sent her off the high loft and onto the floor beneath. He heard the hit of her body but as he looked down the expected sight of her sprawled below wasn't there. Her fingers grabbed him from the back of his neck and drew him towards her.

With a snap of her elbow he careened into the wood paneling. He had her jaw in his palm as he sprung away. There was pain then and the gush of blood and the snap of bone as she broke his wrist and sat heavily, bringing him down to the floor under her weight, her hair streaming behind and above her with the motion.

He snarled and snapped his open mouth at her cheek. It bruised quickly and her fingers closed on his nose until he had to let go of her skin in order to breath, her forehead slammed into his and he saw sparks.

She ripped his jeans from hip to thigh and rubbed her thigh against his bared cock.

Then she was wrapped around it, pulsing and slick and he couldn't help but buck at her, trying to get her off. Her knee pinned one wrist and the other was flopped useless, broken and bleeding.

Her body thrashed and he tried to bite every bit that came within reach until she buried her fingers knuckle deep in his mouth. He gnashed at them as hard as his jaw could bear.

The arch of her spine and the pull of her body only ignited his fury.

A hard thrust gave him enough leverage to throw her off. Looking down with a hand across her mouth he slammed her skull into the floor.

The bite opened his palm and spilled warm, salt spray across her palate.

"Stop."

She rose up and touched his mouth, his eyelids, his cheeks, his hair, studied him slowly.

"Change."

He varied color and feature until she stopped him with a small command: "Fuck."

She put him to task until the sky lightened and she rested curled against him, sweaty and sated.


End file.
